“... London (who did not). In what remains the best and most moving book on Elgar yet written, Michael Kennedy provided the first psychologically-plausible portrait, of an anguished and lonely man who became a music-maker, a seer of visions and a dreamer of dreams. And more recently, Michael De-la-Noy has depicted Elgar in yet darker colours, as a ...”

“... But the winning political coalition forged by FDR was shattered in the 1960s and 1970s, and under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan American politics took a conservative turn. Democrats are still divided over how to respond.Today, an air of foreboding hangs over the party. Despite the rapid economic recovery from the pandemic, Joe Biden’s approval rating ...”

“... and clean, green cities linked together by clean, green jets powered using bio-fuels developed by Richard Branson. There, I told you it was science fiction. And if you needed any more convincing you’ve only to read the frontispiece quote, which is from an essay J.G. Ballard wrote for Blueprint in 1997: I suspect that the airport will be the true city of ...”

“... birthday is approaching, and a historic summit is planned between the Führer and President Joseph Kennedy, as nearly twenty years of Cold War between the world’s two superpowers look set to thaw. And then the corpse of Josef Bühler, the one-time state secretary of the General Government, washes up in a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. Xavier March, a ...”

“... have nuclear capability made the situation even trickier. Astonishingly, Cradock believes that Kennedy’s frantic pursuit of a nuclear test-ban treaty in 1960 was ‘cover for a proposal to Khrushchev that the US and Soviet Union should act together to coerce Mao to abandon his [nuclear] plans. In practical terms this would probably have meant a joint ...”

“... the one great aim of his career. Much later, he was promised a Liberal Democrat peerage by Charles Kennedy, which also never materialised. These rejections both spurred him on and crushed him. Sadly, life at the Bar has not changed a great deal since Carman began in practice. He almost left it a number of times in his early years because of the lack of money ...”

“... and recent appointments to the Supreme Court – this coffee house is adjacent to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and across the Charles River from the Business School. I did not take part in a political cabal, or think that one was being plotted around me, unless the normal conversation of Harvard elites counts as such. It did not occur to me ...”

“... he regressed to gossip about the ‘golden’ Rockefeller women and the ‘wild, wild’ Kennedy boys. He wrote an entire book about Jacqueline Kennedy’s marriage to Aristotle Onassis, The $20,000,000 Honeymoon (1970), which the Times dismissed as a ‘piece of garbage’. He died, aged 65, of cancer in February ...”

“... Gaulle, Kosygin, or the bullet pierced neck of John Kennedy – these poems tell you how it was, I suppose. Beyond that, they show what is wrong with the American Romanticism they proclaim, and not what is right with it. That there are responsibilities, and not merely rights, in the tradition of American poetry ...”

“... Sisman has now studied three: Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Briggs, leaving only Eric Hobsbawm to Richard Evans. Briggs’s widow, Susan, commissioned Sisman to write this Life, and in fact the man himself noted before his death in 2016 that if there had to be a biography, Sisman would be the right person to do it. The result is an elaborately detailed and ...”

“... unpatriotic act – that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.’ In an essay on Richard Wright, published in 1951, he wrote: And there is, I should think, no Negro living in America who has not felt briefly and for long periods, with anguish sharp or dull, in varying degrees or to varying effect, simple, naked and unanswerable hatred; who ...”

“... an assistant to the premier/KCIA chief, acting, for example, as his interpreter with President Kennedy, before launching on a successful ambassadorial career. A third important KCIA Moonie was Sang Kil Han, who became military attaché at the Washington Embassy. All these young officers were fluent Anglophones, and major links in the tight CIA-KCIA ...”

“... well known that the much more authoritative Rampersad (the author of books on Langston Hughes and Richard Wright) had been at work for several years on a definitive biography. Rampersad had signed an agreement with Fanny Ellison and her lawyers that gave him full access to the Ellison papers. Jackson had only partial access. When a young professor publishes a ...”

“... between thought and action, and because it seems that if there had been more men like him, Edward Kennedy might not have become politically prominent. The book’s final section is a series of heavy-footed divagations on the ‘organic community’ and the theme of country v. city. Its four essays are concerned with George Sturt, the Hammonds, the Parisian ...”

“... so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far?’ Richard Hofstadter asked. Graffiti artists shared the intelligentsia’s disdain and defaced Goldwater’s campaign billboards, appending the word ‘Wing’ to his slogan ‘In Your Heart You Know He’s Right.’ Others added the coda: ‘In Your Guts You Know ...”