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“... meccano-work of literary theory. In conclave with her admiring if sceptical husband in Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl, Fanny Assingham remarks of her efforts on behalf of the Prince and Charlotte – efforts which involve, at the highest level, resources of query, speculation, understanding – that whatever happens it will all have been ‘great ...”

“... failed all his O-levels except art because he was too busy playing his sax. Born plain old David Jones in Brixton in January 1947, he grew up in Bromley, and spent his first years of struggling would-be stardom in Beckenham. He’d been in half a dozen bands as a saxophonist, a singer and a mime artist; he’d styled himself as a Mod, a hippy and a ...”

“... Gibbon was made a member in 1774 and Adam Smith in 1775. The importance of other members, such as James Boswell and the pioneering linguistician William Jones, was recognised only posthumously. Alongside Johnson himself (and before one even gets to Garrick or Reynolds), their involvement supports Leo Damrosch’s claim that ...”

“... The reign of James I has long been considered a period in which patriarchal orthodoxy revived in an especially virulent form to counteract 45 years of female rule. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski quotes King James’s advice to his son to illustrate what she frequently calls the era’s ‘dominant ideology’: Ye are the head, [your Wife] your body; It is your office to command, and hers to obey; but yet with such a sweet harmonie as she should be as ready to obey, as ye to command ...”

“... James Purdy​ ’s literary career comes with its own creation myth. He had been making no headway until in 1956 Edith Sitwell read a privately printed book of his stories and, ravished, threw herself into finding him a publisher and an audience. In one version of the event, Don’t Call Me by My Right Name, the book Purdy sent from America to Italy, made the last stage of its journey supernaturally, materialising by Sitwell’s bedside when she woke from a nap ...”

“... house in the International Settlement, with a bathroom for every bedroom and ten servants. James and Edna’s social life seems to have consisted of the grim expat cliché of endless rounds of bridge and too much gin. Their lives hardly intersected with those of Shanghai’s millions of Chinese inhabitants. Ballard’s attempts to befriend the son of ...”

“... too: a game of chicken. (There’s an archetypal game of chicken in Rebel without a Cause when James Dean’s character agrees to settle a dispute with a local gang leader: both men will drive their cars towards a cliff; the one who jumps first is the chicken.) Interviewers know that politicians will keep spinning them a line unless they can do something ...”

“... classless only in the more superficial senses. Its representative figure was Antony Armstrong-Jones, the commoner (and photographer) whose engagement to Princess Margaret caused a stir in 1960, and who liked to wear jeans rather than his old Etonian tie. That year, Armstrong-Jones singlehandedly transformed the dress ...”

“... of them – an evening billed as ‘Art and Politics’ – the Black poet and playwright LeRoi Jones (soon to become Amiri Baraka) held forth, along with the Black saxophonist Archie Shepp and the white painter Larry Rivers. The audience was composed almost entirely of people like me and my friends: white middle-class liberals and radicals, many of whom ...”

“... providing water to strangers, and they were civilised ones. Sharia, the environmental academic James Salzman writes in Drinking Water: A History, means ‘the way to water’. There were limits to what Salzman called the Right of Thirst: you could ask for water, but not for enough to slake the thirst of your camels or your fields. Water, in Salzman’s ...”

“... spectacular car crash that wrecked his face. There are three kinds of classic American crash: the James Dean, Eddie Cochran legend-sealer; the Bob Dylan at Woodstock disaster turned into an opportunity for reinvention; and the sweet Gene Vincent long martyrdom. Clift could have been another James Dean. Instead he was ...”

“... of popular consciousness: American football and nuclear war (End Zone, 1972), pop music (Great Jones Street, 1973), communications from outer space (Ratner’s Star, 1976), clandestine intelligence (Running Dog, 1978), terrorism (The Names, 1982), suburban life and ecological disaster (White Noise, 1985), the assassination of President Kennedy ...”

“... go to heavenHe nasty like the old time, old no. 7.On ‘Rhymes like Dimes’, Doom sampled Quincy Jones and James Ingram’s ‘One Hundred Ways’, and produced just as many quotable lines. Or, as Dunbar put it in ‘We Wear the Mask’, he mouthed with myriad subtleties. As Doom says in ‘Hey!’, another song from ...”

“... January Before’. In January, Protestant Mungo becomes involved with a young Catholic called James. In May, he is entrusted by his mother to the care of a couple of men she met at Alcoholics Anonymous, who undertake to show him the wild beauty of Scotland, and to teach him to fish. If this novel was your only source of information you would assume that ...”

“... Research. One of my teachers was Jack Ubaldi, then owner of the Florence Prime Meat Market on Jones Street, a trim and elderly Italian gentleman with a beautiful smile and a case of knives so sharp that they cut just to look at them. In Jack Ubaldi’s Meat Book, which he dictated to Elizabeth Crossman and published in 1987, he invoked his childhood in ...”