“... in the spacious porch, there is a plaster bas-relief of the Massacre of the Innocents. The asking price for the house was £1.2 million. The figure would have astonished Thomas Stevenson, who was described by one of his wife’s bridesmaids as a husband both ‘grave and scientific’. Their only child was born in the back room downstairs. His mother wrote to ...”

“... states, three more Warsaw Pact nations and Slovenia were added. Diplomats from George Kennan to Jack Matlock (Reagan’s ambassador to the Soviet Union) and William Burns (later head of the CIA under Biden) all warned against extending Nato eastwards. They predicted that the siting of potential adversaries – perhaps eventually nuclear-armed ones – along ...”

“... house in Amsterdam. You don’t have to be Warren Buffett to see that the disconnect between price and value was based on delusional thinking.Most bubbles aren’t like that. Even the South Sea Bubble, the event which gave its name to financial bubbles, had an underlying rationale: who can deny that the expansion of global networks of trade and capital ...”

“... 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 ...”