Ofterdingen and Kropotkin

1L Barium-Sulfate
100ml injection of radiocontrast agent
1 Siemens Somatron Sensation
1 white gown, open at the back
1 chipper radiologist

...the enlivening impact of the culture clash between WASPy bureaucrats and Surrealists, naive Americans and sophisticated Europeans. As Peggy Guggenheim, who has a brief cameo role in the book as the lover of Max Ernst, once complained: "Oh! This new insult - bourgeoise. Why doesn't he call me a whore like all the other men in my life?"

M.J. Reisz, "Surreal Refuge", TLS Dec 1 2006, p.27

But what really attracted the Russian reader was that in Chekhov's hero he recognized the type of the Russian intellectual, the Russian idealist, a queer and pathetic creature that is little known abroad and cannot exist in the Russia of the Soviets. Chekhov's intellectual was a man who combined the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action; a man devoted to moral beauty, the welfare of his people, the welfare of the universe, but unable in his private life to do anything useful; frittering away his provincial existence in a haze of utopian dreams; knowing exactly what is good [...] but at the same time sinking lower and lower in the mud of a humdrum existence, unhappy in love, hopelessly inefficient in everything -a good man who cannot make good.

There's also the fact that we live in a cultural milieu dominated by postmodernism. Broadly speaking, it attempts to deconstruct power and its narratives. It tries to rescue the marginalised. A noble intent, but because it doesn't believe in truth, anything goes. The tyranny of orthodoxy has been replaced by the tyranny of relativism. You are supposed to believe in nothing; hence nihilists and atheists are suddenly rather chic. Postmodernism has taken tolerance to the extremes, where extremists thrive. It's a dangerous form of appeasement.

The last supreme court chief justice William Rehnquist took a powerful sedative during his first decade on the high court and grew so dependent on it that he became delusional ... when he stopped taking the drug in 1981, according to newly released FBI files.

J.-L. Godard: At the customs, they said, "Why are you here, for business or pleasure?" I said, "Business." The officer said, "What kind of business?" I said, "Unsuccessful movies." He was very nice, because he said, "Oh, I'm so sorry."

When Evelyn Waugh wrote in a review of The American Way of Death that Mitford did not have "a plainly stated attitude to death," Mitford asked her sister Deborah to tell Waugh, "Of course I'm against it."