“... you now is like/seeing a god or a king/naked and starving in a field,’ the poet Rebecca Morgan Frank wrote in ‘Monk Automaton, c.1560’ (2021), an ode to the machine. But clothed and activated the monk becomes uncanny, even whimsical. When placed on a table it traces the path of a seven-pointed shape. With its head turning left to right, and its eyes ...”

“... Old Church Slavonic or translating Rimbaud. Meanwhile, pioneering scholars like Barbara Tuchman, Frank Manuel and George Whalley mined gold year after year from the lodes of ore in the libraries.The roots of this bookish postwar New York, as Denise Gigante shows in Book Madness, stretched back deep into the 19th century. Some of them also nourished ...”

“... to Maud Gonne, and then became involved with her daughter Iseult, to whom he also proposed. Joseph Hone writes about this in his authorised biography of the poet, published in 1942. When Iseult finally rejected him in the summer of 1917, he decided to propose to a young Englishwoman, Georgie Hyde-Lees. He wrote to Lady Gregory: ‘I certainly feel very ...”

“... promise and the caveat were one and the same. If psychoanalysis is ‘a testimonial science’, in Frank Cioffi’s words, a world without witness, whose crucial scenes are played out in camera, then Freud’s word must be his bond. By the same token, he cannot easily be spoken for. And yet the biographers have never stopped speaking – for him, or against ...”

“... in a city that doesn’t sleep and find I’m king of the hill, top of the heap.’ The lyrics of Frank Sinatra’s standard ring out like a mocking chorus from the Yankee Stadium when the hometown wins. Poor Trump, who thought the song should be his anthem, could never shake his ‘little town blues’. His humiliation at his failure ‘to make it ...”

“... in Media movement: among AIM’s patrons were William Simon, the former Treasury Secretary, Joseph Coors, the beer magnate and Reagan confidant, Claire Booth Luce, Jimmy Goldsmith and Richard Mellon-Scaife. Moon now felt confident enough to take on the hated New York Times by launching the New York News World and, in 1982, to take similar aim at the ...”

“... said, as he turned the Shenandoah Valley into a wasteland of burned fields and ruined homesteads. Frank Vizetelly was in the neighbourhood, reporting and drawing (as he had been throughout the war) for the Illustrated London News. ‘The sight of emaciated women pleading with soldiers for bread to feed their children led him to accuse Union troops of ...”

“... over which Shawn kept the tightest of reins. Brennan’s male colleagues, including Addams, Joseph Mitchell and Brendan Gill (all of them her lovers at one time or another), joked that she had served her apprenticeship in hemlines. But it was the ability to spot the difference between ‘beige’ and ‘bone’ at fifty yards that made her a natural ...”

“... an emphasis evident in his admiration for the only writer to whom he devoted a full-length book, Joseph Conrad. MacKay, not unreasonably, sees Watt as part of a wider intellectual style that flourished in Britain in the ten or 15 years after 1945. It emphasised clarity and plainness in writing rather than obscurity or ornament, valued concreteness rather ...”

“... power in 1933, it quickly established a Ministry for National Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels, who set about establishing control over the BBC’s German equivalent, the ReichsRundfunkGesellschaft (RRG), and put into production a cheap radio, the ‘people’s receiver’ – broadcasting’s equivalent of the Volkswagen. Radio, according ...”

“... reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.’ During the Second World War, Joseph Sr could have been forgiven for thinking he was on the way to being rich. He worked for his uncle Bill Sheen, the inventor of a sealant used in cemetery vaults and a military contractor. The job came with perks: free plane tickets, a Buick Roadster and a ...”

“... panels of her costume like a plump English rose trying to play the innkeeper’s wife who turns Joseph and Mary away in a school nativity play. Her role as a dream creature indifferent to the ladylike prescriptions of my upbringing, tilts into something quite other. Is that quality I took to be heroic self-possession a far more conventional, ladylike ...”

“... also an inherently unstable fiction.’This isn’t to say that pre-modern societies forbade frank speaking on principle. In classical times, free citizens were able to speak their minds in the assembly on matters of public interest, civic or religious. In Athens, this liberty was called parrhesia (speaking everything), in Latin, licentia. This sort of ...”

“... Geller’s arm and pointed out of the bus at some distant clouds, shouting: ‘Look! There’s Joseph Stalin in the clouds! What is he doing up there?’ He had the bus stop, and ran into the desert. ‘Oh my God, Larry, follow me!’ Elvis was babbling, tears running down his face. He grabbed Geller, hugged him and said: ‘You’re right: you told me the ...”

“... instead David Lynch, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Marcel Duchamp, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, Hugo Ball, Geoff Dyer, Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis.Lamb deserves​ much better than this. He deserves, most of all, an account that makes you want to read him. His prose only intermittently wears ...”