“... One of the few​ facts of American history of which Donald Trump appears to be aware is that George Washington owned slaves. Trump mentioned this in 2017 as one reason for his opposition to the removal of the monuments to Confederate generals that dot the southern landscape. In Trump’s view owning slaves probably enhances Washington’s reputation: like him, the first president knew how to make a buck ...”

“... dominates the portal’s moods derives from the actual would-be tyrant. Lockwood doesn’t name Donald Trump. She refers only to ‘the dictator’.The narrator limits her fears about call-out culture to the worry that, one day, she herself will be maligned. She doesn’t indulge in the grievance of the bloviates who refer to themselves unironically as the ...”

“... and the oligarchs who gained ownership of privatised assets.When the media want to discuss whether Donald Trump is a fascist, whether Brexit is an imperialist project or the way pandemics end, historians will be among the experts consulted. The public intellectual in the English-speaking world who has offered the most expansive sociological analyses of the ...”

“... For Sir Thomas Browne it was a commonplace that ‘the number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live.’ But this is no longer necessarily true, as has been pointed out in these pages before now: there may be more people living now than all the people who have ever died. With over 5.4 billion of us alive today, on course to become 8 ...”

“... Ruth Fainlight’s poems and everything that is implied in the essays about modern poetry in Donald Davie and the Responsibilities of Literature. Here we are in a man’s world, more specifically the world of male academics in committee, responsible for defining the proper areas of poetic idiom, arbitrating between them, assessing performance and ...”

“... especially despised Surrealism, reserving particular contempt for the New Apocalypse school (Dylan Thomas and Co), whose influence was just beginning to register on the Australian literary scene, mainly thanks to the only avant-garde journal of the time, Angry Penguins. Angry Penguins was edited by Max Harris, a student at Adelaide University, and John ...”

“... superiority that commands prestige, and abilities of which society cannot sanely deprive itself.Thomas Piketty quotes Boutmy’s proposition in Capital in the 21st Century (2013), the bestseller that made him a household name among today’s intellectual and business elite. According to Piketty – and it is hard to disagree – this ‘incredible ...”

“... and races were staged with unprecedented intensity in such media ‘events’ as the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, and the David Duke campaign. Conspiracy theories detailed the infiltration of American higher education by ‘politically correct’ militants, and lamented the takeover of the art world by feminists, homosexuals and ethnic ...”

“... successors, the Nashville Agrarians – Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Donald Davidson, to name the most prominent. Turning to more recent times, Genovese relies on the anti-modernist commentaries of Richard Weaver, a Southern sociologist in Chicago, and Melvin Bradford, a literary critic in Dallas, who both firmly believed in a ...”

“... bluebells? There are further guest appearances by Proust, Freud, Virginia Woolf, Ramsay Mac Donald, Winston Churchill and other ‘stars’, and it is not every pair of Cockney youngsters who travel to France, as Amos and Zak do, in a laundry-basket full of General Haig’s underpants. All this is good fun, but the dialogue is sometimes inexcusably ...”

“... leaders and intellectuals, including Stalin, Einstein, Henry Ford, Mussolini, Fritz Kreisler, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, H.L. Mencken, Anatole France, H.G. Wells, the dean of Harvard Law School, Roscoe Pound and 205 members of the law school’s 1927 graduating class. Interest in the case did not die with the men’s executions. It has been the subject ...”

“... way he felt about them. This well describes de Kooning’s own way of working, which involved, as Thomas Hess described it in his essay of 1953, ‘De Kooning Paints a Picture’, making ‘a continuous series of drawings which are cut apart, reversed, exchanged and otherwise manipulated on the painting.’ Krauss has no trouble citing other examples of de ...”

“... form a substantial electoral bloc that did not consistently pursue its own economic interests. As Thomas Frank noted fifteen years ago in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, such issues have been the Holy Grail of conservative politics for some time. None of the things the culture wars were fought over stuck, until immigration finally did the trick, neatly ...”

“... detective story or civilised thriller. The drama critic James Agate, who once savagely described Donald Wolfit’s Hamlet as a private detective watching the jewels at the Claudius-Gertrude wedding feast, may have said more than he knew. Yet to praise Hamlet as the first detective story makes sense mainly in terms of a conceit, feasible partly because ...”

“... to discussion of the revolution.Further west, in Princeton, or much further, in Pacific Palisades, Thomas Mann and his family spent diverting evenings – this in 1939 – debating which of Zweig, Ludwig, Feuchtwanger and Remarque was the worst writer. Emil Ludwig himself, in an obituary, wrote that none of Zweig’s writings had affected him in a way that ...”