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“... on Emily Dickinson’s white dress, a replica of which is on display in Amherst. (Or, as in Billy Collins’s well-known wink-nudge piece, taking it off.) Pedestalisation and de-pedestalisation are two sides of the same coin, and both are beside the point. Farley and Roberts might recall the episode in The Trip where Steve Coogan explains to Rob Brydon ...”

“... evaded onerous personal responsibilities, as most addicts do: primarily with respect to his son Billy, who pathetically aped his father’s protean drug and alcohol consumption, hoping to win his approval, and ended up dying of cirrhosis at 33. Burroughs repeatedly had other people bail him out of trouble with the law, and drew a generous allowance from ...”

“... me, I can perceive nothing but a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a Commonwealth.’) Bindoff would not have been in total disagreement. Although in temperament conservative, insisting that his lecturers at Queen Mary College wear suits, his outlook was the Butskellism which was the immediate legacy of the ...”

“... Customer Relationship Management (CRM) databases. ‘At a minimum these databases contain the name and email address of most of our users. For users of some of our services, these databases may also contain a postal address or telephone number.’The attack, which took place on 28 October, began with the wholesale copying of records held by the ...”

“... a performance only marginally less farcical than that of the man with his doll and his box. But a name is always a role for Borges, an idea of the self, and the interplay between actor and part takes many forms in his writing. In one of his early prose works, The Universal History of Infamy (1935), Borges says of Billy the ...”

“... Sir, was delicate, was nice; Bubo observes, he lash’d no sort of Vice: Horace would say, Sir Billy served the Crown, Blunt could do Bus’ness, H – ggins knew the Town. Erskine-Hill rightly points out that ‘Pope does not give this account of Horace in his own person but puts it into the mouth of the pusillanimous and time-serving “Friend”.’ It ...”

“... as one would expect of a European inclined to see in cinema the possibilities of High Art. The name suggests that Olga Mara is meant to stand in for Theda Bara. Bara was (despite the claim in Mariusz Kotowski’s subtitle) Hollywood’s original femme fatale, or, as they used to say, ‘vamp’. But she was merely a counterfeited version of European ...”

“... George W. Bush as a line of fashion accessories or a perfume does to the movie star that bears its name; he no doubt served in some advisory capacity. The words themselves have been assembled by Chris Michel (the young speechwriter and devoted acolyte who went to Yale with Bush’s daughter Barbara); a freelance editor, Sean Desmond; the staff at Crown ...”

“... is another standard move, and when Gates wants to create a more likeable male ironist – like Billy in ‘Star Baby’, the most effective story in The Wonders of the Invisible World, who’s seen giving ‘his best imitation of a guileless smile’ – he makes the character gay, perhaps to take the edge of eccentric wilfulness off his advanced sense of ...”

“... whole, and summarises the whole tapestry by the single thread by which it was unpicked, even the name ‘Watergate’ has become inadequate. Yet if one black nightwatchman had not noticed signs of forcible entry in that hideous condo on the Potomac (where the hapless Democrats had so typically sited their campaign HQ), and had not decided to raise the ...”

“... an experience akin to being saved, achieved through the inspired oratory of an apostle, whether a Billy Graham or an Aneurin Bevan. Such spirituality found the material world quite repulsive. Thus Foot objected to the EEC because it would mean joining ‘the rich nations’ club’. And, of course, it would diminish the House of Commons, an unthinkable ...”

“... fashion. Pierre is a bristlingly harsh challenge to the readers of such books, and the posthumous Billy Budd takes its place with other less literary protests against virtual matriarchy – for instance, muscular Christianity, macho college sports, Social Darwinism and Theodore Roosevelt’s big stick. Douglas is a feminist, but in an unusually moderate and ...”

“... not enjoy the same rights as Europeans. None of these achievements (nor the fact that his son, Billy, went on to become the first black British publisher) is mentioned by Gerzina. Also omitted are aspects of Sancho’s life which might make him less sympathetic to some modern readers – his fervent Royalism, his Toryism, his casual anti-semitism, his ...”

“... is quite unsurprising. As a young master at Eton, he had been much under the influence of that Billy Johnson who, discovered as writing with injudicious warmth to a pupil during the holidays, had abruptly changed his name to William Johnson Cory and fled in shame and consternation into the depths of the New Forest, there ...”

“... wouldn’t have made any difference. Unless you were listening to Cliff Richard or attending Billy Graham’s hallelujah meetings, the Sixties (not the decade, but that period from 1965 to 1972ish) were irresistible. They have been the good fortune and the curse of my generation (‘May you live through interesting times’): we thank our lucky stars ...”