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“... opposed to it: Rome was after all known as the eternal city. But in Apocalypse and Golden Age, Christopher Star argues that Greeks and Romans were, in fact, pioneering and often deeply pessimistic thinkers about the long-term future of humanity. In contrast to Jewish and Christian apocalyptic texts, they do not often imagine the survival of ...”

“... At the close of the Fifties, the New Left put on a mass meeting in London, at which the star speaker was Isaac Deutscher and the slogan was ‘Into the Red Sixties’. At the close of the Seventies, there was a much-anticipated rally in Central Hall, Westminster, unironically billed as ‘The Debate of the Decade’, between Tony Benn and the leaders of the supposed British extra-parliamentary opposition ...”

“... its triumphs could be carried forward by a whole range of later historians, by Veronica Wedgwood, Christopher Hill and the rest. Carlyle hated democracy, both the word and the idea, which is no doubt one source of his appeal at Peterhouse. But Cromwell’s army was much more truly representative of the English people than was Parliament, and Carlyle it was ...”

“... intersecting activities in near-contemporary Shanghai are mapped out at a leisurely pace in Five Star Billionaire. The others are Phoebe, an undocumented migrant and naive reader of guides to getting rich quick; Gary, a manufactured but authentically gifted pop star trying to break into the mainland market; Justin, the ...”

“... group presented a funfair vision that launched the British Pop Art movement. Robby the Robot, star of the science-fiction movie Forbidden Planet, opened the show because, according to the critic Reyner Banham, he was much ‘easier to book than Marilyn Monroe’. Banham wrote an essay, in the form of concrete poetry, for the accompanying catalogue, which ...”

“... Christopher Logue​ dwelled in a state of perpetual agitation that ranged from unbridled curiosity and enthusiasm to unbridled indignation and exasperation. If one were to find him at rest between the two poles, one wouldn’t have to wait long for the weather to shift dramatically. He was like that when I first met him in Melbourne, sometime in the 1980s, when he was sixty or so, and remained so over the course of our friendship ...”

“... as long as they serve his turn. I had no idea, until I read this book, that Big Bill Tilden, star of so many tennis-playing schlock movies, was the model for Ned Litam, Lolita’s tennis coach. Nabokov, who had divined the man’s passion for ball-boys, simply rendered ‘Ma Tilden’ backwards. Anger clinches the story with habitual callousness: ‘Big ...”

“... unusually easy to determine. High indeed was the sight and sound of Aretha Franklin singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, and giving it a variation that provided one of those only-in-America moments which do in fact only occur in America. Lower, both in scale and register, was the experience of seeing Roy Hattersley cruising the upper galleries of the ...”

“... expense. ‘Bernard went and got lost, talking to Susan Dey at the bar. He’s a would-be star-fucker. Susan Dey was emotional about the play and said she was protesting war now. I don’t know which war. Nicaragua, I guess.’ ‘And Steve Rubell was there and he wasn’t that friendly. I mean, he was really friendly, but sometimes he’s really ...”

“... to be a victor here. John Driscoll, who happened to be on the premises, told me that ‘the real star of the show’ is Francis Guy’s Harpers Ferry, Virginia, painted in 1808, fifty years before John Brown’s famous raid on the federal armory, which was meant to inspire a slave insurrection across the South. Guy, who follows the classical conventions of ...”

“... Pebbles, The Thomas Crown Affair, Bullitt – it was Robert Mitchum, his elder by 13 years and a star for more than twenty, who was voted the screen’s ‘godfather of cool’ on America’s university campuses.Both men had got to where they were by doing or seeming to do nothing. It was the fashion. Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin, James ...”

“... enough to have earned for Brooke a small foothold in Gay Studies’. The star turn was a letter first printed in full in Paul Delany’s The Neo-Pagans: Friendship and Love in the Rupert Brooke Circle (1987). Writing to James Strachey, Brooke describes some encounters with his fellow Rugbeian Denham Russell-Smith: We had hugged ...”

“... one anonymous fan has called it on the internet, Gojira seems peculiarly concerned to invest its star attraction with pathos. In the eerie final sequence, in which Godzilla and his antagonist perish at the bottom of Tokyo Bay, it’s not easy to tell who we’re meant to feel more sorry for. Ifukube said that the monster was ‘like the souls of the Japanese ...”

“... and Pericles, the two most powerful statesmen in this age of Athenian ascendancy. As Athens’ star rose, so did Phidias’, though his close association with its most famous citizen, Pericles, was to prove a liability as well as a blessing.Also on display are the earliest known sculptures thought to derive from an original by Phidias: three ...”

“... starring Bill Murray, which took the piss out of the repetitious and the banal by capturing the star in a time-warp where he was doomed to enact the same day over and over again until he could learn to act his way out of it. Other smart films have been made on dumb subjects, or about apparently dumb people. Rain Man was a masterly study of the idiot ...”