“... originally had in mind. People now began once more to say nasty things about The Waste Land: Brian Howard complained in the New Statesman of having to deal with a plague of poems modelled on that work, so that the mere occurrence of the words ‘stone’, ‘dust’ or ‘dry’ condemned them to the waste basket. Even among knowing readers the standing of ...”

“... pay and to return $250,000 to the Trust. It was a spectacularly extravagant decision to commission Richard Meier in 1984 to build a new Getty Center – including the chief museum, the Research Institute and the Conservation Center – as a cluster of buildings on a hilltop in Brentwood accessible only (for ordinary visitors and most staff) by a steep ...”

“... Buckingham. In London there were two men – the architect Inigo Jones and the collector Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel – who could claim to be authorities when it came to art in Italy, but on the ground there they had to deal, as did Charles, with the piratical broker Daniel Nijs. Nijs pounced on the Gonzagas of Mantua when they happened to be short of ...”

“... harder,’ Newsweek wrote of Sparks in August 1953, shortly after he’d moved to NEA, the Scripps Howard wire service. When he learned of his Pulitzer – in 1951, for articles describing the Stalinisation of East Germany – he was covering a Chinese artillery barrage in Korea.Sparks didn’t write in the Olympian tones of Dorothy Thompson, Walter Lippmann ...”

“... why great players like Lampard and Gerrard suddenly look like they’ve been drafted in from Howard Wilkinson’s Sheffield Wednesday. And the accompanying thought: where are the real England team? Who’s keeping them hostage? Will they escape? Will they turn up in time? That’s definitely the last time I eat cheese at bedtime.27 June. They did ...”

“... 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 supposedly utopian ...”

“... 1928, a previously unknown painting turns up on the London art market. It belongs to a Major Henry Howard of Surrey. He is 45 years old. His father has just died and left him a large estate, and he’s selling off much of it – houses, land, family heirlooms. There are death duties; he has five young daughters and a marriage that’s going to end soon. He ...”

“... was overthrown. The CIA had no intricate strategy for the war it was unleashing in Afghanistan. Howard Hart, the agency’s representative in the Pakistani capital, told Coll that he understood his orders as: ‘You’re a young man; here’s your bag of money, go raise hell. Don’t fuck it up, just go out there and kill Soviets.’ These orders came from ...”

“... the 1980s by a touch of incestuous and homo-erotic feeling. Writing in the New Republic in 1979, Richard Hall faulted the five-volume biography for manifesting ‘a peculiar timidity at the centre of the work’. What was missing from Edel’s account, according to Hall, was not so much James’s ‘homo-erotic bent’ – Edel had, after all, speculated in ...”

“... is like painting in this respect. It does ‘the real talking’, as Kermode says of the work of Howard Hodgkin, in its own tongue. We don’t have to translate its language, we don’t have to talk for or about death, and we don’t have to write criticism of visual art or anything else. But we still need, in Kermode’s fine words about paintings, ‘to ...”

“... to the art critic Bernard Berenson, which have been edited with unobtrusive wit and erudition by Richard Davenport-Hines.* During the Suez crisis of 1956 Trevor-Roper concluded that ‘there is in England, as in other countries, a fascist world: the world of lower-middle-class conservatives who have no intelligence but a deep belief in violence as a sign of ...”

“... became involved in communist politics and labour agitation in 1920s New York. Gordon, fresh from Howard University, became part of the New Negro movement and transformed the nationalist politics of Black self-defence, learned in his childhood, into communism in the early 1930s. Their relationship began at roughly the time the Popular Front was founded, and ...”

“... to build careers on the blacklist. The virus that would surface decades later, disguised as Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, began here. Fault lines in the American psyche are most obvious at the interface of showbiz saccharine and the political process: Monroe’s birthday tribute to JFK, Sinatra as MC at the Kennedy White House, late-liberal ...”

“... Law (1997); and Fox Nation v. Reality: The Fox News Community’s Assault on Truth by Mark Howard. I toss these books together to indicate how this digital age, which prides itself on its abundance and freedom of information, has become so uneasy about the pervasiveness of lying. We might add to these indictments three of Oborne’s earlier ...”

“... have disliked anyone holding power. The episode of 1521, when Wolsey is alleged to have packed Richard Pace off to Rome, has been misunderstood, for Pace was glad to go on his embassy, and his subsequent breakdown, normally blamed on the cardinal’s ruthlessness, merely shows how unreliable are the charges Pace brought against him. The Duke of Norfolk ...”