“... followed. And Berenson then embarked on his dramatic apprenticeship in buying and advising ‘Mrs Jack’ Gardner, resolved to stock Fenway Court ‘with only the greatest paintings in the world’. They were supplied forthwith: Titian’s ‘Rape of Europa’; Rembrandt’s 1636 self-portrait; a Philip IV by Velazquez; Rubens’s Earl of Arundel – all for ...”

“... suddenly became the source of loyal battalions ready to die for the Hanoverians and the Union Jack. Jacobite refugees who had settled in America almost unanimously rejected the revolution and fought for the king who had crushed them at Culloden. How was that possible? Some say that Jacobitism was always blindly authoritarian. Devine, on the other ...”

“... hate-bursts Roth could handle, employing his rhetorical ninja skills. Such Sturm und Drang was the price of breaking the sound barrier that separated Promising Upstart from Major League Sensation, and there was way more money in the bigs. What was flummoxing for Roth was finding his name and his protagonist turned into punchline material. He didn’t share the ...”

“... of British sailors lined up on the decks, in their crisp white uniforms, saluting the Union Jack, and apparently experienced some kind of Anglophile epiphany, from which he has not yet recovered. This story has often been related in the press here, but when I repeated it in Egypt people laughed. Mohamed, they said, may well have visited the docks and ...”

“... an irreversible disenchantment with the industry, portraying Prokosch, the producer (played by Jack Palance), as ‘simultaneously ruthless, vain, childish, arrogant, stupid, greedy, self-deluding’. After Le Mépris, Le Gai savoir and the work of the Dziga Vertov group seem inevitable. Dixon sees King Lear, which he observes ‘might arguably be ...”

“... Peter Orszag, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, William Daley, Michael Froman, Jason Furman and Jack Lew were all finance-to-government mediators of this stamp. Trump, however, gives up all pretence of a distinction between finance and government. A possible reaction is delight, as at an honest revelation. A later reaction may be fury, as at a betrayal. But ...”

“... Ezra Pound, Virgil and Sextus Propertius.’ He also introduced his girlfriend to Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Carolee Schneemann. ‘Her eyes opened wide.’In later years, Acker often said that she had studied linguistics under Roman Jakobson. This wasn’t true, Kraus thinks: Jakobson taught at Harvard, which didn’t take girls until the mid-1970s. Acker ...”

“... assigned on grounds of his subject-matter to the naturalist tradition of Dreiser, Frank Norris, Jack London, James T. Farrell and Wright, Algren departs from these writers in his prose; Malcolm Cowley called him a ‘poet of the Chicago slums’. All Algren’s losers have tales to tell, flights of fancy that fail to get them out of trouble. At the ...”

“... gentle-mannered son was a friend of mine – was a positively grande dame. Then she asked after Jack Haldane, Sage Bemal, Jo Needham, none of whom I yet knew. The response next day when I passed all this on to Montagu and Edgell was, ‘Ah, Red Ammo! Hasn’t changed a bit. After the scientists still.’ Between systems must always be an awkward place: you ...”

“... character in the Henry VI plays (1590-92) is not an honourable warrior but the populist rebel Jack Cade, who has Lord Saye beheaded because ‘he can speak French, and therefore he is a traitor.’ The xenophobic rhetoric favoured by Cade is assigned to another repulsive character in the last of this sequence of histories, Richard III (1593), when before ...”

“... passers-by to bid for the one item he had for sale – a single, dirty sock. ‘Go on, name your price.’) This is meant to be a gilded age for Brick Lane. Young Bangladeshis have driven away the packs of racists who even in the middle of the 1990s would head there to provoke and maraud. Now all of its four parts are safe for non-whites: the patch nearest ...”

“... it even when I was a part of it.16 March. One of the lowest moments this year was Tony Blair and Jack Straw misrepresenting the French and German position on Iraq in order to encourage xenophobia and get more support from the Murdoch papers.17 March. A bin Laden associate reported as being ‘quizzed’ by American agents in Pakistan. Were suspects ...”

“... and the deaths and maiming of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Russians, as the necessary price of success. It would have brutally and successfully shown its power to crush what little internal opposition remains. It would have exposed the limits of Nato and the EU – Ukraine gets talks about membership, not membership – and of US ...”

“... rate. I had dropped out of college, and had been knocking around the continent pretending I was Jack Kerouac. My folks weren’t too thrilled with me, so when I came to town I stayed in the Village with my brother. He had begun to take more of an interest in me now that I showed signs of developing into a fully fledged fuck-up. I remember the particular day ...”

“... of course, the reason for our being there could be put off no longer, and, for me, the price of being with my father had to be paid for by seeing my mother. She wasn’t dramatically mad any more; she was a shell now, an emptiness, either drugged or semi-catatonic, or both, which passively received our bunch of flowers from the nurse, who took them ...”