“... and thank you’, the orchestra launches into an 18-second version (it fades out) of Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’ – generated spontaneously, it seems, because they sound like a high-school marching band at its first rehearsal. Ellington had never before performed ‘God Bless America’ (famously recorded by Kate Smith in 1939) and ...”

“... In his landmark zoological study ‘The New York Intellectuals’, published in Dissent in 1968, Irving Howe patronised Sontag as ‘a publicist able to make brilliant quilts from grandmother’s patches’, a ‘highly literate spokesman’ for those ‘who have discarded or not acquired intellectual literacy’. But the notion that Sontag was slumming or ...”

“... the cinematography or the design.It was the beginning of the off-network TV tsunami that John Landgraf, the head of FX, calls peak TV. By 2022, he estimates that there were 559 scripted original shows on American television. HBO followed The Sopranos with Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Deadwood, Entourage, True Blood, Boardwalk ...”

“... than winning the National Book Award for a first book? With Saul Bellow, Leslie Fiedler, Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin in his corner – ‘four tigers’, as he describes them, of American Jewish literature – it might have been possible to ignore the fringe of pious malcontents, but appeasement has never gained ground in Roth’s personal style. In ...”

“... in the Spectator, of which Neil is the chairman: an exercise of Jones’s free speech rights that John Stuart Mill would have recognised as a paradigm.Owen Jones, meanwhile, is subject to an endless stream of vitriol from politicians and journalists, as well as ordinary Twitter users, and was assaulted by a man on the extreme right who recognised him in a ...”