“... 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 ...”

“... minority. The religious divide ran through Montaigne’s family; his sister Jeanne and brother Thomas became Protestants. In Gascony, Bordeaux remained under Catholic control while much of the surrounding countryside was controlled by Protestants. As a locally prominent Catholic, Montaigne put himself at risk whenever he rode between his estate and the ...”

“... he was 17, Britten went to church in Lowestoft and heard ‘quite a fine sermon’ by the Rev. Thomas Henry Stanley, who was standing in for the incumbent, the Rev. William Reeve. Reeve was away – in case you care, he was in Blankenberghe, Belgium. On August Bank Holiday in that year Britten went to see a show with Paul Robeson in it; a supporting act ...”

“... sketched is one that has been very popular in recent philosophy. Its most notable proponent is Donald Davidson, who has inspired a good deal of discussion about how exactly the premises and conclusion of such arguments are best formulated. But so far as I know, Coady is the first person to extend the reasoning into the area of testimony. He gives due ...”

“... holds a special niche permanently vacant for those bookish old ranters (Michael Foot, Norman Thomas) who can qualify for that sort of affectionate obituary even while they are still alive, the paradox of the traditionalist rebel does not automatically connote charm or breadth of mind. In the Puritan revolutions of old, and the Islamic ones of ...”

“... effective leader of his party and an outstanding prime minister. Having reacted against Ramsay Mac-Donald, the argument runs, Labour stood in need of a personality who would put party above self, and Attlee fitted the bill. Yet in his quiet fashion he was skilful in managing the Party and holding it together. Hence Labour’s victory in the General Election of ...”

“... the line of great dead critics – Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Trilling and Donald Davie. If, as I believe, this volume does add up to a book, in fact a considerable one, it is artfully shaped as a study of bereavement and of commemoration – not least, as a tribute paid by one of the living to great artists. An essay on Marlowe sets ...”

“... Special Operations forces.In his last year in office, Obama began accelerating that campaign, and Donald Trump appears determined to expand it. In March, Trump issued an order declaring parts of Somalia an ‘area of active hostilities’, giving US commanders greater autonomy to order attacks and allowing for more civilian deaths than the Obama ...”

“... his own, between inadvertence and acumen. (As when Larkin good-naturedly thinks it is a pity that Donald Davie’s poem ‘A Sequence for Francis Parkman’ doesn’t ‘tell me who Parkman is: one of his American friends, perhaps’. It is a pity, too, about the expunging of what I had taken to be just such an immersing in the deconstructive element: Sylvia ...”

“... label – borrowed from the abstract expressionist painters in their circle, and marketed through Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry – has somehow endured. In that anthology, Guest was the only woman in the New York School group, and one of only five other women in total (there were 60 men). She has seldom been included since. In 1970, David ...”

“... but remain inaccessible to human cognition? Here we are on well-trodden philosophical ground, with Thomas Nagel asking ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ and vindicating the incommensurability of subjective experiences, especially across species lines. Yet Chomsky has remained wedded to the humanist tradition and the search, the notion of an immortal soul ...”

“... gods and spirits, worshippers burned, buried or immersed such votives – there was a chapel to St Thomas Becket on Old London Bridge. The lid of the box containing the Jamestown ampulla was inscribed with a capital ‘M’, which might have been the owner’s initial, or stood for ‘Mary’, akin to the apotropaic double-Vs, thought to stand for ‘Virgin of ...”