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“... Inside, under a glass cover, was the embalmed corpse of Ho Chi Minh, two years dead, dressed in a white suit. US troops never found the heavily guarded site, although once, by chance, they landed nearby. A North Vietnamese general told the team from Moscow that if the Americans ever captured the body, Hanoi would be prepared to give all up its US POWs to get ...”

“... to take in a few people around the band: Wilson, Hannett and the band’s manager, Rob Gretton. Sam Riley gives a perfect impersonation of Curtis, capturing his mannerisms, the onstage flailings and the voice. The original intention was for the actors to mime to the songs, but in the end they performed them themselves. This makes the live scenes feel ...”

“... a lawsuit recently filed against Purdue. ‘The prescription blizzard will be so deep, dense, and white …’ The active ingredient of OxyContin is oxycodone, a semi-synthetic opiate (an ‘opioid’) first synthesised in Germany in 1916. Prior to OxyContin’s launch, oxycodone had been marketed as a painkiller in various pill forms for years, including ...”

“... devices left around – the stage-directions, the Hollywood sets and props, or the drollery of white-furred crocodiles and cyanide shoes. But some of these devices are a bit nervous. ‘The Unconscious Imitated by a Cheesecake’ – chapter heading – was perhaps arrived at by chance, through aleatory techniques (not generally much in evidence in this ...”

“... study of the ‘systems of the body’. The book is remarkable for its lack of other people. Sam, Ehrlich’s dog who was struck by her side, is given a character we come to know as rounded and vibrant. He works hard, is loyal, affectionate and alert; and is duly rewarded with hamburgers and fries at fast-food chains when there is one nearby. Blaine, the ...”

“... tell him that people receiving American food parcels were not chanting, ‘Thank you, Uncle Sam, for the rice,’ but: ‘By our blood, by our souls, we will sacrifice our lives for you, O Saddam!’ Somebody fucked up, and blame is thrown from hand to hand like a live grenade. Sooner or later, if nobody falls on it, it will blow them all away. The ...”

“... birth son having his revenge on the usurping adoptive brother, we know from the presence of a white cat that Oberhauser will reveal himself to be Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the sinister mastermind familiar from three of Ian Fleming’s later novels and from his showdowns with the Bonds played by Sean Connery, George Lazenby and Roger Moore. (Copyright issues ...”

“... in many novels and films, from Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin to Michael Verhoeven’s The White Rose. Stauffenberg and the other conspirators of July 1944 understood that their plan to murder Hitler and stage a coup was unlikely to come off. Instead of success, there would be the recorded fact that they had tried. They played for moral ...”

“... and Virginia Woolf; and with Chiang Kai-shek, Hitler, Mussolini and Roosevelt, not to mention Sam Goldwyn and Charlie Chaplin. These are the men and women who made the modern world, and the Modernist expression of it: their identity as a generation is more important than 1914, a year in which some of them began to fight a war, but more of them ...”

“... I would happily hold forth for hours about the rugged terrace-time I’d served, at Feethams, White Hart Lane, the Manor Ground. And when it came to the archival stuff, if you could spare the time, well, so could I. ‘Name three of the Spurs’ double side’s reserves,’ I’d say, or: ‘How many of the 1964 West Ham cupwinning team had names ...”

“... novels, the last three of which are available in English (from Harvill) as All Souls, A Heart So White and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. All three are admirably translated by Margaret Jull Costa, who not only catches the meanings of words with grace and precision, but gets rhythms of thought, and even better, rhythms of afterthought to carry over into ...”

“... deplore manifestations of ‘people’s power’ and wonder whether they shouldn’t increase VAT. Sam Shilowa, the president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, is surely right when he says that it is ‘inconceivable’ that the pre-1994 ANC could have come up with its present macro-economic strategy – reduction of the budget deficit from 6 to 3 ...”

“... dire Jim Carrey utopia. The mayor of the city, and the governor of the state, are two mirthless white ethnic conservatives named Giuliani and Pataki. They have restored capital punishment, and encouraged franchising of all sorts while discouraging loitering and littering. Not long ago, a Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima was grabbed outside a funky ...”

“... and her husband, the ‘Duke of Ellington’. The people who told you the stories were always white and they had never heard the commentator themselves; either ‘a friend’ had, or they’d ‘heard’ that it had happened, thus confirming that one, and possibly two, comfortable old South African realities were still in place. In any case such stories ...”

“... her buggered by an Irish builder on the bonnet of a BMW one more time. Meanwhile a gay man like Sam, who runs a cheese shop in the town, can have a tender live-in relationship with handsome Harry that is refreshed rather than undermined by regular orgies, well-run and splendidly catered. As an individual I have a huge vested interest in the viability of gay ...”