“... John Wayne Gacy was one of many serial killers and mass murderers infatuated with John Wayne. Henry Kissinger is another. ‘I’ve always acted alone,’ he has said. ‘Americans admire that enormously. Americans admire the cowboy ... entering the village or city alone on his horse ... A Wild West tale, if you like.’ Pat Buchanan, too, has tried to ...”

“... mantelpieces. He shows not the slightest hint of embarrassment about the material expression of power derived from wealth. And the physicality of it all, of the clothes, the coiled hair and the flesh, makes the pictures sexy in a way you do not expect portraits, particularly society portraits, to be. These are likenesses, while owing little to the pursuit ...”

“... imaginary? In April 1819 there arrived in London a tale of uncertain origins. It was published by Henry Colburn in the New Monthly Magazine under Byron’s name. John William Polidori, Byron’s former physician, claimed it as his own and threatened a lawsuit to recover the rights to it; Byron disclaimed authorship. The magazine promised to correct its error ...”

“... He did enough to make you realise that with stronger writing Last Tango could have had tragic power. But somehow his very talent or celebrity had got in the way.Mann’s is the best short life of Brando we’ll ever have, and nearly as good as his incisive portrait of Katharine Hepburn, Kate (2006). I say ‘short’ with some irony, but it might actually ...”

“... church.Many puritans were young, rejecting convention and seeking an identity. The Hebrew scholar Henry Ainsworth spent his early twenties drifting from Norfolk to London to Ireland to Amsterdam, subsisting on boiled roots and the word of God. Even mature figures such as Robert Browne, who in the 1580s lent his name to Ainsworth’s brethren ...”

“... or the forces that ensure its reproduction. Effective altruism doesn’t try to understand how power works, except to better align itself with it. In this sense it leaves everything just as it is. This is no doubt comforting to those who enjoy the status quo – and may in part account for the movement’s success.Yet behind MacAskill’s cheery ...”

“... model a fictional character in negative space, though the effect isn’t an easy one to bring off. Henry Green, another writer with a taste for hiding in plain sight, at a distance from the material of his books but present in every syncopated phrase, manages it very effectively in Nothing (1950). The key figure in the novel is the widowed Jane Weatherby, who ...”

“... fact of the new century: industrial momentum. ‘Prosperity never before imagined,’ Henry Adams wrote in 1907, ‘power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid.’ Motion pictures – 24 projected frames a ...”

“... a kind of entitlement drawn not from late Romantic aesthetic ideology, but from an inheritance of power and prestige accumulated over generations. The two kinds, it appeared, could co-exist. Solomon promptly agreed that his wife and adopted son should henceforth spend six months of the year in Chicago, and six in Europe. The arrangement came to an end in ...”

“... This, too, ranks high among poems of the war. On its own it would be enough to class Johnston with Henry Reed, Bernard Spencer, F.T. Prince and Norman Cameron. It is a high-quality example of what can by now be seen to be a particular school of Virgilian plangency, the poetry of the broken-hearted fields. But it is probably not one of Johnston’s best ...”

“... To encourage the English-speaking reader of German literature to think of Thomas Mann as Henry James with this quality of mind added and that taken away, or of Rilke as a pseudonymous Stevens or Yeats, would be to abandon the fascinating otherness of the German tradition before its impact had been fully felt. Heller urges his reader to cherish the ...”

“... Troeltsch, Mannheim, Merton, Parsons, Radcliffe-Brown and more. In his preface he thanks Adorno, Henry Nash Smith, I.A. Richards, Talcott Parsons and Peter Laslett, among others. The standard caricature of the Cambridge-influenced criticism of the postwar years represents it as blunderingly empirical and cosily parochial: these stereotypes wilt and shrivel ...”

“... like other self-creating poets, had to invent a persona – that of ‘Anne Bradstreet’, or ‘Henry Pussycat’ – in order to become his real self set down in words. Lowell had no need for that: his self and his persona were both absolute Lowell. Yet he did share with his peers the general characteristics stated by Auden to be typical of American poets ...”

“... of Old Europe loathes Parker, and for reasons not dissimilar to those for the hatred of Bush: the power both are seen to wield is as coercive as it is crude and clumsy. The numbers do not tell the whole story here: indeed, the numbers may be a red herring. Between a 20-point scale and a 51-point scale (which is what Parker’s amounts to), the issue can ...”

“... rivalries that risked breaking up the firm were made more serious by the fragmentation of Habsburg power that followed the abdication of the exhausted and unwell Emperor Charles V in 1556. Changing political winds in Spain prompted a thorough audit of the Milan post office, then overseen by Lucina Cattanea Tassis and her postmaster lieutenant, Ottavio ...”