“... Read had outlined in an article of May 1939. The contemporary American art, which included work by Jackson Pollock, Rothko, Motherwell and Baziotes, was legitimised, and in some measure influenced, by the European imports that hung around the corner. What we find in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice today encapsulates this relationship between her ...”

“... Enlightenment Virginia. Nevertheless, greater democratisation came in the 1830s during the age of Jackson; a tragic and bloody Civil War had to be fought in the 1860s to end the peculiar institution of Southern race slavery; democracy was extended to women voters in 1920; and desegregation in the second half of the 20th century would at last confer civil ...”

“... lore had Warhol moving into bed with his mother while his father slept upstairs with Paul and John [Warhol’s siblings],’ Gopnik writes. When Julia moved to New York to live with her son, people ‘thought she was stupid’, a friend said, ‘but she was brilliant beyond belief … and much smarter than Andy.’In high school, Warhol was not known for ...”

“... Home’s collection of essays, which includes chapters by Douglas Johnson, René Rémond, Julian Jackson, Michel Winock and Serge Berstein. Perhaps the most interesting contribution, however, is Jean-Marie Mayeur’s essay on ‘De Gaulle as Politician and Christian’, for the whole point about de Gaulle was that, although he came from the classic ...”

“... of India: within these loosely-defined parameters were situated schools such as Cathedral and John Connon as well as Campion, colleges like Elphinstone and St Xavier’s, the important office buildings that belonged both to the Government and to private companies, the Bombay Gymkhana club, and the Jaslok and Breach Candy Hospitals. This was where not only ...”

“... description of a visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1970 when he walked down John Russell Pope’s majestic central hall, the last great classical building in the Western world, with the galleries on either side ‘crammed full of people who stood up and roared at me, waving their hands and stretching them out towards me’. He was ...”

“... get up without me. I helped her in the shower, singing bad renditions of Madonna, Michael Jackson and Wham! songs when she got flustered with drying herself and putting on face cream and brushing her teeth and pulling up her tights. (Approximate versions of 1980s pop aren’t prescribed for Alzheimer’s, but music very much is.) I found new ways of ...”

“... which opened in 1925. She was, he said, the essential seventh artist in his stable, belonging with John Marin, Arthur Dove, Paul Strand, Charles Demuth, Hartley and O’Keeffe. O’Keeffe pitched in too, writing to Stettheimer: ‘I wish you would become ordinary like the rest of us and show your paintings this year!’ But Stettheimer wasn’t ordinary when ...”

“... Nico, on which she sings some of the band’s best-known tracks, but they were not welcoming. John Cale recalled that, listening back to rehearsal tapes, they would ‘hear her go off-key or hit the wrong pitch at the start. We would sit there and snigger.’ Lou Reed, understandably, wanted to sing his songs himself, but Warhol and Morrissey were ...”

“... pieces is any treatment of the greatest phenomenon of the American Left in recent years, the Jesse Jackson show. This is a pity: Jackson’s shameless opportunism, the dark facts of his career in Chicago, his heroic womanising, his refusal to run for any office which might mean taking responsibility for anything, and the ...”

“... pounding drums to scare the furry creatures, consecrate testosterone, and push the sale of Iron John. In Revolution From Within, Campfire Girl Gloria Steinem chronicles her exasperating fall and rise and fall and rise and fall and rise in male-dominated America with the crackle of a marshmallow heaving over a flame. Miller would have loved it all and ...”

“... icons now under Japanese management include the Rockefeller Center, Universal Studios and Michael Jackson. Such high-profile acquisitions are seized upon by opportunistic commentators, all too keen to foster suspicions of Japanese duplicity, racism and greed. Writing about Japan, its society and its foreign affairs has to an overwhelming degree become the ...”

“... ears and hands. In 1977, his ten-year-old son died when a gun went off accidentally at home in Jackson, Mississippi. Simpson believed that he was being punished. He took to barring the windows and keeping the drapes drawn. His arms and legs shake uncontrollably, and among the dozens of bottles of pills he has is one labelled simply ‘for pain’. He has ...”

“... cabin passengers, with special stores and accommodation, and lots of time for quarrelling. At Port Jackson, labelled ‘Botany Bay’ by the author, presumably to perpetuate the myth that convicts went to Botany Bay, he was allotted two convicts as servants and allowed to buy a farm and lead a life of relative leisure. The treatment of upper-class radicals was ...”

“... he was about twelve or thirteen he walked into his parents’ bedroom in the half-house on Jackson Road not expecting his father to be there, and the old man was standing in front of his bureau in just socks and an undershirt, innocently fishing in a drawer for his undershorts, that boxer style that always looked sad and dreary to Harry anyway, and ...”