“... by all the other literature-soaked rhetorics currently available. A neat chapter on the explorer John Charles Frémont serves to make a similar point: Fender shows Frémont moving between picturesque modes of writing and scientific recording – ‘sometimes the oscillation between the two modes is nervously rapid’ (‘nervous’ – what else!). There is ...”

“... Others, such as Nelson Algren (the director of its Illinois branch), Conrad Aiken, Saul Bellow and John Cheever, had already begun to make their reputations. Studs Terkel would find his calling when the FWP sent him out onto the streets of Chicago to collect oral history. Most striking was the impetus given to the careers of black authors: Zora Neale ...”

“... for almost thirty years, over which time it had attracted some notable members, including Jackson Pollock, Richard Price and Judy Collins. But its more disturbing practices had passed unnoticed by the wider world until the Voice ran its exposé. Even then, as members defected and word spread of the grotesque cruelties perpetrated in the name of its ...”

“... the Fanny Bowditch Katz papers. She was the niece of the important American neurologist James Jackson Putnam, and when she became desperately depressed following the death of her physician father, he sent her to Jung. The treatment almost fell apart during the first year, and the stormy letters exchanged between her, Jung and Uncle Jim are of historical ...”

“... Holocaust has taken hold among American Jews precisely because they are not victims. When Jesse Jackson said in 1979 that he was ‘sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust’, he was repeatedly criticised by Jewish organisations because of his espousal of the Palestinian cause. But it was not insignificant that ...”

“... frame, and they were also breaking British laws against the export of new technology. President Jackson later dubbed Slater ‘the father of the American industrial revolution’. Back home in Derbyshire, he was ‘Slater the Traitor’. Thus Hamilton was not only the father of the strong presidency and the American banking system, for which he is already ...”

“... I saw no cowboys on television but plenty on the movie screen, from the Lone Ranger and Tonto to John Wayne, and I still have a picture of myself as a little boy in a cowboy outfit with a hat and chaps and toy pistols. It’s a small indication of how deeply influenced Cubans were by our mighty neighbour to the north, and the way the fiction of the ...”

“... House of Adams’ is ‘buried’ and ‘beyond recovery’. History in the guise of Andrew Jackson and U.S. Grant had seen to that. Ancestral traits presaged the family’s decline. The Adamses had good reason to think well of themselves (they had ‘held in succession every position of dignity and power their nation could give’), but they were a ...”

“... birth to a son and was shown to have had several lovers. The Daily Mirror had a photo of Lord John Russell ‘In Women’s Guise’ after evidence had been heard about his cross-dressing, and the Express (owned by the moralistic Beaverbrook) had a picture of the baby under the headline: ‘Who Is My Daddy?’ It was a feast, all the more so because ...”

“... she gave throbbing lectures in spangled satin and Egyptian beads, and was painted by Augustus John in silks that don’t look too dusty. David Piper called it ‘the only existing humane portrait of a Lady Don’ and Harrison was pleased, thinking she looked ‘like a distinguished prize-fighter who has had a vision and collapsed under it’. Wade’s ...”

“... organisation with anti-semitism and anti-Catholicism. Half a century later, Cobb County elected a John Bircher to Congress five times; it is now represented by Newt Gingrich. Although a 1967 Supreme Court decision finally overturned the Georgia state law that barred racial intermarriage, in 1986 the Supreme Court upheld a Georgia statute outlawing consensual ...”

“... one or two good anecdotes, to illustrate his points. There is the tale of Hazlitt’s fight 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 ...”

“... by a living American. Here is the poem: As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking, – John, I sd, which was not his name, the darkness sur- rounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for christ’s sake, look out where yr going. Written around 1954, the poem got wide notice after ...”

“... John Berger’s selected essays run to nearly six hundred pages, yet that is just the tip of the iceberg if one looks at the totality of his published work: the essays and reviews about the visual arts – drawing, painting, photography, film – but also short stories, journals, screenplays, travel articles, letters, television scripts, translations, novels, poems, even a requiem in three parts which gives a wrenching account of the untimely deaths of three of Berger’s neighbours ...”

“... had no interest in direct political action against the bombers and racists of Birmingham, Alabama, John Rice made a passionate speech to the campus in 1970 to commemorate the students killed at Kent State, calling them ‘young people who gave their lives for the cause of freedom and for the cause of eliminating useless war’. He went on: ‘As I look out at ...”