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“... lives saddled with debt, in jobs or internships that don’t provide enough money to live on. As Malcolm Harris puts it in Kids These Days, ‘for anyone who takes out a student loan – and that’s two-thirds of students – succeeding at contemporary American childhood now means contracting out hours, days, years of their future work to the ...”

“... the end of his Native Stranger: A Black American’s Journey into the Heart of Africa (1991), Eddy Harris spends two despairing weeks waiting at Lisala on the banks of the Zaire river for a steamer to take him to Kisangani. Behind him are North Africa, Francophone and English-speaking Africa, and a disastrous foray into the former black American colony of ...”

“... kind of novel – a jaunty, entertaining, unrereadable sexual comedy with some good one-liners (‘Malcolm was wearing one of his enormous Japanese suits that made him look like a crashed hang-glider’) and a healthy dose of unreconstructed wish-fulfilment. Alex, the main character, is a socialist publisher who has become rich by publishing The Republican ...”

“... party members carried guns in full display at San Francisco Airport while escorting Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow. There was a stand-off between Panthers and police officers. Six weeks later, the Panthers marched with guns into the state capitol building in Sacramento to protest against pending gun-control legislation that targeted the ...”

“... in little magazines throughout the 1960s, there was a 15-year silence between The Nightfishing and Malcolm Mooney’s Land, during which, it is said, his publisher, Faber, assumed (possibly hoped) the poet had died. Even within the brotherhood of the St Ives group, Graham’s poetry was little read or appreciated. The links between Graham and the painters ...”

“... of Margaret Thatcher, Vivienne Westwood ‘lost interest’ in punk. She and her lover Malcolm McLaren had been at the heart of the British version: they had dreamed up much of the look, the attitude and the lyrics, though not the sound. A full year before David Bowie adopted the same hair style, Westwood had her hair bleached blonde and cut ...”

“... such varied activities as the riots at Toxteth and the manufacture of nuclear weapons. When Malcolm Muggeridge and I were young we used to speculate about the end of civilisation. Little did we expect it would come in our lifetimes. I regard myself as a loyal member of the Labour Party. By this I mean that I usually disagree with what it does. Take the ...”

“... and Aristophanes can procure a pardon for that sort of thing. Other reviewers may commend Thomas Harris for committing ‘not a single ugly or dead sentence’ but Amis finds enough of them to label Harris ‘a serial murderer of English sentences’ and Hannibal ‘a necropolis of prose’. He finds the opposite response ...”

“... Sex Pistols Story is pure rock’n’roll, right up there with Marilyn Monroe and John And Yoko. Malcolm McLaren, a pranky, arty small businessman, spots a boy in his shop wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt with the words I HATE scrawled on it. The band get thrown off their first label, EMI, after a chain of embarrassing publicity starts with a Pistol saying ...”

“... specifically a ‘horsewhipping’ or a ‘dog-whipping’, depending on their rank. When Frank Harris falls out of favour he becomes ‘a dirty skunk and as crooked as a corkscrew’. When the Duke of Richmond refuses him entrance to the private stand at Goodwood, he gets a letter from Bosie regretting that he himself does not enjoy the ‘Privilege ...”

“... for his life beside a car in which a woman has been shot dead. At one point, Travis, played by Malcolm McDowell, passing the vodka to his friends, Johnny and Wallace (David Wood and Richard Warwick), asks: ‘When do we live? That’s what I want to know.’ Elsewhere in the film, when the three of them are fencing together, playing at fighting, Travis ...”

“... last section, ‘Rectitudes’, takes us into the area of explicit public debate on language. Roy Harris investigates swear-words and their place in those ‘litmus-paper areas of British culture’, poetry and cricket, in a discussion of the controversy which surrounded the reporting of two major linguistic events of the Eighties: the broadcasting on Channel ...”

“... for the South Bank Show, ‘smiling, simpering, giggling, looking down at his nails’. Richard Harris at the Savoy in 1990, ‘playing pocket billiards’ through his tracksuit bottoms. Rafael Nadal in Rome in 2011, ‘lying on a massage table with his flies undone, affording me a good view of his Armani underpants – Armani being one of his many ...”

“... so not expecting anyone else to either. The great loves of his life map out his career: Richard Harris (This Sporting Life), Albert Finney (Billy Liar), Malcolm McDowell (If ...) and Frank Grimes. None of them seems to have come across (if that, indeed, was what he wanted). They were all incorrigibly male and not all were ...”

“... that seemed to mock what you hadn’t yet said, the villain’s moustache he had grown, he told Malcolm Muggeridge in 1940, in imitation not of Ronald Colman but of Friedrich Nietzsche, whom he adored and to whom he bore a resemblance. Above all, that harsh, thrilling, unnaturally slowed-down voice. Has anyone else ever made the loveable Brummie accent ...”