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“... its presence felt at the Chicago World’s Fair (the Columbian Exposition) in 1893, where, at what Susan Curtis perceptively calls a significant ‘frontier of modern culture’, the music of black Americans offered serious competition to the classical music of Europe. Despite an economic depression, people flocked to the ‘midway’ and the sporting ...”

“... Allan Quatermain – an elephant hunter with good manners – and his colleagues, Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, on a journey into Mashukulumbwe country. Quatermain early on stakes his claim to heroic status when he says that he has already killed, but always with the stern regret of the Victorian imperialist: ‘I have killed many men in my ...”

“... the story of her life has been bound up with, and contorted by, his overbearing presence. Cathy Curtis, author of the first biography of Hardwick, has the opportunity to set this right, to begin at the beginning.Elizabeth Bruce Hardwick was born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1916, the eighth of eleven children. Her siblings became teachers, post-office ...”

“... of practitioners, but Dillon’s responsiveness is wide, to Virginia Woolf, to William Gass, to Susan Sontag, to Lester Bangs and to Roland Barthes (his first and most important inspiration). Most practitioners regard essay-writing as a sideline – Davenport set store by his stories, so much less vital than his non-fictional prose – but Dillon sees ...”

“... of a sprawling skyscraper. Seen as a montage, this array of images has the quality of an Adam Curtis film, a procession of strange, jarring anecdotes set in an exciting and terrifying ultramodern world which now exists only in fragments. There are dozens of possible routes through the book’s texts, whether via Tocqueville’s comparisons of the United ...”

“... No woman on earth, she complained, would be so dumb as not to see that the two drag artists, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, were men (the director, Billy Wilder, clearly agreed with her, filming in black and white: colour would have been a giveaway). Monroe was a would-be breakout artist. ‘If I hadn’t become popular,’ she said to Weatherby, ‘I’d still ...”

“... remember thinking … Why couldn’t I play the part? I felt I could do it just as well as Susan Strasberg.’ Her talent, especially at the beginning, was a product of her ambition rather than the other way around; when she played a Roman slave pining after a centurion, ‘I wasn’t particularly attracted to the actor. So … I put a piece of ...”