“... successful careers than the great majority of those who did. The idea spread across the Atlantic, Benjamin West being the first American artist to make the pilgrimage to Italy, sponsored by Philadelphian patrons. He spent three years there before going to England, where he decided to stay instead of returning to America. But artists did not go to Italy only ...”

“... streets of Chicago to collect oral history. Most striking was the impetus given to the careers of black authors: Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison were given their first chance by the FWP. Its ambition was to create – or rather to discover – a great American epic in the acts and words of ordinary men and women: to draw from the ...”

“... Cognition v. culture is where we have got to after debates in the West spanning millennia. Benjamin Lee Whorf gave Sapir’s ideas their most radical twist. He was employed all his life by an insurance company as a chemical engineer; his business acumen was directed at the causes of fires. In his free time he studied under Sapir. Reporting later from ...”

“... two centuries later, and indeed Gordon Campbell comes clean in his appended essay. The Gothic or black-letter type of the original is thought to be too difficult to read easily, even for the sort of people who would enjoy such a volume. That has an unfortunate side effect common to any modern edition of the KJB which keeps the original convention of ...”

“... 1564, are the words hic incepit pestis: ‘Here begins the plague.’ ‘God’s tokens’, the black or purplish spots that were a telltale sign of bubonic plague, had presumably been found on Gunne’s body. Over the previous six months, the vicar of Holy Trinity Church had registered a score of burials; in a town of just under 1500 inhabitants, that was ...”

“... I wanted something bigger, broader, deeper, and I wanted to know about Marx and Hegel and Walter Benjamin – I had a crush on Benjamin, actually, as a result of the essay with which Hannah Arendt introduced her selection of his work in Illuminations, and Susan Sontag’s ‘Under the Sign of Saturn’ (1978). I would have ...”

“... of her Irish-American sentiments. Patricia’s father’s stories of the Great Hunger, the Black and Tans and the Easter Rising are always there in the background, like the didactic paintings on the back walls of Vermeer’s interiors. When the inevitable pay-off comes, however, and Mickey turns out, unsurprisingly, to be a murderer (and, much worse, a ...”

“... repeats. In one of these, Xenophanes observes that Ethiopians say their gods are snubnosed and black, while Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair (‘gray eyes’ in Auden). Another is by Kafka: ‘The true way goes over a rope which is not stretched at any great height but just above the ground. It seems more designed to make men stumble than ...”

“... DeLillo, where again Walden and Thoreau feature, this time as inspiration for a novelist called Benjamin Sachs, whose dissatisfaction with writing fiction as a way of engaging with the world leads him, via Austerian chains of coincidence, to a campaign of symbolic terrorism as the ‘Phantom of Liberty’, blowing up replicas of the Statue of Liberty across ...”

“... of Burke has a long history, going back at least as far as the 1830s and 1840s, when Benjamin Disraeli concocted lineages of authentic Toryism which he distinguished from mere conservatism. Disraeli’s hero was Viscount Bolingbroke, the leader of the Tories in the early 18th century, but he also found a place for Burke, notwithstanding the Whig ...”

“... unreal, the deathly, the disguised, the predatory, the phantasmagoric? The famous tagline Walter Benjamin borrowed from Leopardi – ‘Fashion: Madame Death! Madame Death!’ – seems made for the world Ensor shows. ‘The Intrigue’ (1890) Look again at The Intrigue and Skeletons Fighting. What seems to me stupendous about them (and thoroughly ...”

“... make good on your debts, but also whether you were the kind of person likely to do so. It is as if Benjamin Franklin had anticipated this intensity of scrutiny when he wrote, in his ‘Advice to a Young Tradesman’ in 1748: The most trifling actions that affect a man’s credit are to be regarded. The sound of your hammer at five in the morning, or nine at ...”

“... century, this clarity belongs to the philosophers who identified the ‘poverty of experience’ (Benjamin), ‘deep boredom’ (Heidegger) and ‘experience of depersonalisation’ (Lévinas) that characterise modern life. The inner touch has been withdrawn; hence ‘the unfeeling faces and bodies that fill our screens, our books, and our newspapers with ...”

“... with John Lamb, in the course of a dispute about Holbein and Vandyke. I will quote the version in Benjamin Haydon’s journal: ‘They both became so irritated, they upset the card-table, and seized each other by the throat. In the struggle that ensued, Hazlitt got a black eye; but when the two combatants were ...”

“... the tip of his stylus? You may prefer Marguerite Porete, burning alive with her book, or the rich black intersection of St John of the Cross or the pyroclastic whisper of Anonymous, Unknown Author. Or something a little closer to home – Jeannie, for instance, the family friend whom my father (a Catholic priest in full cassock) calls simply a Eucharistic ...”