‘Over the decade and a half that Brown has endured as a publicly recognised prime minister-in-waiting, he has been variously portrayed by the restless British press as dour, witty; passionate, nerdy; impatient; a long-term strategist, a lover of short-term crises; good on detail, bad on detail; a delegator, a control freak; a bully, an inspiring boss; a bearer of grudges; tough, cowardly; content, “psychologically flawed”; a secret socialist, an ultra-capitalist; a Europhile, a Eurosceptic; an idealiser of America, an unofficial Scottish nationalist; a political genius, a political liability; an instinctive politician, a machine politician; an intellectual; anti-establishment, socially conservative; pro-feminist and laddish. Most long-serving politicians acquire complicated reputations, but Brown’s is one of the knottiest.’

‘At 40,000ft, the editor of Hustler looked down the cabin and had a vision of “a guy with sandals on, and an old man with a beard. I took it to be them,” says Flynt, referring to God and Saint Paul. Deeply affected by the appearance of his distinguished fellow-passengers, he began making changes to his magazine. The cartoon strip “Chester the Molester” became “Chester the Protector – Guardian of Young Girls”. Hustler, Flynt promised, “will no longer demean women.” If you take a look at the “Asian” section of the Hustler website (you might begin with “Noy”, a young woman who explains how surprised and thankful she was to discover that US servicemen have larger penises than the humble Vietnamese) you’ll notice there’s been something of a rethink on this front. “What happened to fighting for Jesus?” “What happened was, I went to a psychiatrist. And he diagnosed me as being bipolar.” “And that’s why you saw God?” “Right. If only all of those born-again converts would take a little lithium, like I did, they’d be fine.”‘

‘[In an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm], the chat between Larry and Krazee Eyez Killa (a rap star, played by Chris Williams) becomes a freewheeling improvised exchange in which Krazee Eyez Killa reads one of his raps and asks Larry for a critique. Larry nods judiciously. “I like it — I got one tiny little comment,” he says. “I would lose the motherfucker at the end — ’cause you already said fuck once … I would change the motherfucker to bitch.”

Krazee Eyez Killa beams, and gives Larry a hug. “You my dog,” he says, warmly. “You my nigger … I like you! Check it out — you like eatin’ pussy?”

Larry shrugs. “I like it, I like it,” he says. “But I’m a little too lazy … It’s a whole to-do, you know. It hurts my neck.”‘

I like my girlfriend, but I’m dying to go date other girls. I know I could do a lot better than her.

I have three testicles.

i pissed on my neighbors cat… i feel really bad about it

• Independent Obituary: ‘…she certainly did not mind discussing with me her relations with Hitler and his various henchmen, and her time in prison. She knew Hitler intimately as a friend, describing him, almost with tears in the eyes, as a man of unusual sensitivity and tenderness (“You should have seen his hands, the delicacy, the beauty of them, and, oh Jim, his blue eyes . . .”), who hated cruelty (“He cannot have known what went on in the concentration camps” and “I know for an absolute fact that he never watched the films taken of the deaths by hanging with piano wire of the abortive putsch on his life in 1944”).’
• Diana Mosley, Unrepentantly Nazi and Effortlessly Charming … ‘The death of Diana Mosley brings to an end one of the most curious questions of British upper-class etiquette: how does one deal socially with an unrepentant Nazi?’
• The Myth of the Mitfords … ‘A starring appearance at a Nazi rally might be thought a difficult thing to live down, but Lady Mosley – or “Lady Diana Mosley”, as she somewhat oddly insisted on calling herself – contrived to manage it. Much of her later life, in fact, consisted of a stalwart defence of the indefensible – or rather not, as she seemed never to have experienced the slightest qualm that she had anything to be ashamed of.’

‘…presumably, I say, you would no longer say things like “Give the coon a crack on the way out”? He looks baffled. “Course I would. Cos we’re all laughing, all enjoying ourselves.” He tries to explain why. “We’re all enjoying ourselves, and the coon wouldn’t be on his own … there’d be a party of black … whatever. I’d say: ‘Give the coon a crack on your way out, it’ll make you feel good.’ Well, it wouldn’t make you feel good. You wouldn’t dream of giving the coon a crack on the way out.” Eventually he gives up. “It’s a joke, you cunt.” “Cuckoo!” says the clock.’

‘PAGLIA: There’s something retro about your persona. It’s like the pre-World War II generation of reporters — those unpretentious, working-class guys who hung around saloons and used rough language. Now they’ve all been replaced with these effete Ivy League elitists who swarm over the current media. Nerds — utterly dull and insipid.

DRUDGE: But you look at these tanned, blow-dried gym bunnies like Brian Williams, NBC’s next anchor — all they do is read off a teleprompter, and no one has a problem calling them journalists. In the end I really don’t care what I’m called, as long as it’s not blogger.’

‘Inescapability is central to Schrader, as is emotional coldness: think of the slick hustler played by Richard Gere in American Gigolo – inhumanly cold, impenetrably opaque. It is Schrader’s one big commercial hit – and evidence that it’s not his subject matter so much as his treatment of the subject that puts him outside the mainstream. There is no trajectory in a Schrader film that leads to a happy ending or a neat solution. “I don’t believe life is about problems and solutions. I believe it is about dilemmas, and dilemmas don’t have solutions; they have resolutions, which then morph and lead you into future dilemmas.” So he takes his human dilemma, writes it large, abstracts it from the rituals of daily life – his people don’t function in a “normal” world, nobody is having breakfast with their kids, mowing the lawn, or meeting a friend for lunch – and plays out their inevitability.’

‘Commercially speaking, it’s hard to argue that peer-to-peer music-sharing doesn’t have the same effect as walking out of Virgin Megastore with the latest Coldplay CD under your jacket. But by moralizing the issue – here and in a series of ads featuring artists like Stevie Wonder and Britney Spears – Rosen and her colleagues have failed to grasp the fact that they’ve already lost. File-sharing has become part of pop culture; witness the Intel ad that shows a scruffy guy happily burning tunes onto a CD-R. To some extent, at least, the record companies have themselves to blame. Whereas blank CDs sell for pennies at the nearest CVS, the price of new releases continues to creep up in most stores, to the point where movies can be cheaper to own. Rosen, 44, seems to have planted herself squarely in the path of inevitable technological change.’

‘The Catholic religion teaches us that redemption is possible, that even the greatest sinner – even someone who has tortured and killed children for the obscene pleasure of it – can be washed clean of their guilt. Evil is a noun, something like dirt inside you. But for most of us, evil is more like a verb: something you do, not something you are. This is the more modern and more terrifying view of our moral universe – because, instead of regarding Hindley as simply monstrous or aberrant, ‘possessed’, as it were, by evil, we have to start seeing her as not so very different from all of us, just someone who made different choices. She is not alien, but human. This is what humans can do, if they take the hellish road and step by step go down it.’

‘Issue 28 of Oz was edited and written by schoolchildren. It was probably the montage of the cartoon characters Rupert the Bear and Gipsy Granny having sex that led to Dennis, Neville and Jim Anderson being prosecuted in 1971 for obscenity and conspiracy to corrupt the morals of young children. The case pitted Establishment against counterculture as squarely as Punch versus Judy. Judge Michael Argyle, QC, MC was a Cambridge-educated racing and boxing enthusiast known for the severity of his sentencing, and an almost comic disconnection with the modern world. He’d described one gay victim of a street attack as a ‘little sodomite from Glasgow’. Argyle said Dennis was ‘very much less intelligent than his fellow defendants’ and sentenced him to nine months, which was quashed within a week by appeal judges who identified 78 misdirections to the jury.’