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“... In 1950 the great American fashion photographer Irving Penn wrote to Cecil Beaton, for whom he had recently sat, praising his ‘vague clairvoyance, the gentleness of not meeting the subject too head-on’. Beaton himself put it more vividly: ‘I coo like a bloody dove.’ It required a particular quality of cooing to coax from his royal clientele the florid, uptight, boring, outlandish and occasionally wonderful images in the V&A’s exhibition of his royal portraits (until 22 April ...”

“... designer: a man, it appears, of active sensuality verging on self-indulgence. Now compare the Irving Penn photograph for the back jacket of Music for Chameleons. Emaciated fingers delicately support a frail skull: without their help, you feel, the head might simply snap off. One hand, indeed, supplies the vertical hold, the other the horizontal. The ...”

“... walls. The show is surprisingly short on Klein’s fashion work, where he was the graphic equal of Irving Penn and a far stranger photographer than, say, David Bailey or Richard Avedon. But then he has long been ambivalent about his fashion photography; already in 1966 he had skewered that milieu with Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, the first in a series of ...”

“... portrait Cockette John Rothermel in Fashion Pose, from 1971, has aspects of Cecil Beaton and Irving Penn – feathers, rouge and diamante – but it’s Rothermel’s haze of chest hair that really makes it. ‘I like people who dare,’ Hujar said.That’s not to say his portraits lack vulnerability. In September 1973 he photographed the Warhol ...”

“... Horn of Plenty’, a super chic retro homage-to-cum-satire-of the New Look and the elegance of Irving Penn.† It’s perhaps too easy to read this show with hindsight and find self-hatred seeping through it all, but self-disgust and the fear of imaginative collapse are forcefully conveyed. He rallied strongly with the digital innovations of ...”

“... montage, and pilfered from El Lissitzky and Rodchenko in order to sell Dior. Through his students Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, he also helped to engineer the retro-fitting of ‘fine’ art with the styles and concerns of advertising. All this is hardly to scratch the surface of Art since 1900 and its proliferation of sub-narratives. Crafting a book ...”

“... an uncomplicated global elegance. The 1950s also saw Vogue’s attempts at egalitarianism. Irving Penn invited tradesmen into the studio – fishmonger, bricklayer, street sweeper – for a ‘Small Trades’ feature and photographed them in their work clothes. Photojournalist magazines like Picture Post had been publishing such images for ...”

“... and rivalry. Paradoxically, this is why so many of the club escape mention except in footnotes. Irving Howe, for example, gave no sexual trouble to anyone we know about. Nor indeed did Diana Trilling. William Phillips and William Barrett seem to have been uxorious or monastic by contrast to the friends whose hands they held at moments of crisis. ...”

“... and businessmen: among them Daniel Bell, J.K. Galbraith, Felix Rohatyn, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Irving Howe and Eudora Welty. These and other signatories – the economist Kenneth Arrow, the poet Robert Penn Warren – were the critical intellectual core, the steady moral centre of American public life. But ...”

“... notes), Roth appeared in danger of being pegged as a novelty act – a high velocity show-off. Irving Howe’s ex cathedra denunciation ‘Philip Roth Reconsidered’ (Commentary, 1972), which tried to stuff Roth back into his jack-in-a-box before he trespassed again (rereading Portnoy’s Complaint had laid bare its claptrap construction and jejune ...”

“... includes Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Penn Warren, Peter Matthiessen, Philip Roth, Irwin Shaw and the always vivacious William Burroughs (‘He is an absolutely astonishing personage, with the grim mad face of Savonarola and a hideously tailored 1925 shit-coloured overcoat and scarf to match with a ...”

“... of the now lost ‘critic as intellectual’, those emblematic figures such as Trilling or Irving Howe who assumed their cultural inheritance in the 1940s and 1950s. Wilson, born in 1895, came into his own in the 1920s. It underlines his remoteness to recall that he had already graduated from Princeton before America entered the First World War. His ...”