“... but no chorus rises to proclaim Podhoretz the bold young successor to Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Stanley Edgar Hyman and Mary McCarthy in the Quality Lit Crit Biz. He is needled as a symptomatic New York intellectual specimen by Benjamin DeMott in the New York Review and cuffed around roughly by Hudson Review’s Marvin Mudrick, who ...”

“... to stray into his territory. Indeed, he goes out of his way to say that ‘I did not do a Harold Wilson and publicly criticise Mervyn, even when on further occasions he volunteered advice on our fiscal policy.’ All he will say is that he called him in for a private chat, and reminded him of their understanding ‘that I would not comment on monetary policy ...”

“... ruins, the exploration of geographical and social wastelands. Some, following in the footsteps of Paul Theroux’s Kingdom by the Sea, see the Northern towns as horrors. Others, indignant at the haemorrhage of jobs and skills, chart the progress of disindustrialisation. Ian Jack’s Before the Oil Ran Out and Robert Chesshyre’s The Return of a Native ...”

“... jokes about Clinton are always the same joke. ‘When he comes to a fork in the road,’ writes Paul Greenberg of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, ‘he takes it.’ He wants to have his dozen Big Macs and eat them too. And so forth. (I myself have contributed a one-liner: ‘Why did Bill Clinton cross the road? Because he wanted to get to the middle.’) In ...”

“... as a critic. Agee was not interested in teaching his audience, as Shaw and Mencken and Edmund Wilson were interested, and as his colleagues at the Nation Clement Greenberg and B.H. Haggin were. He does not drive home an argument and avoids underlining the implications of a perception. Rather, he will broadly sketch a chosen compliment, travesty, explosive ...”

“... Japan. There, the building that kicked off Brutalism was the Yale Art and Architecture Building by Paul Rudolph, a sculptural, self-conscious monument lined in ‘corduroy concrete’. The ethic, here, was wholly architectural – a ‘truth to materials’, an ‘expression of structure’ and, especially, an expression of the building’s technical ...”

“... media scapegoating. Heath called the ‘Who governs Britain?’ general election, and lost. Harold Wilson’s Labour government then pushed the unions into a policy of supposedly voluntary wage restraint with the Social Contract, while continuing to let unemployment rise and living standards fall. People were ‘once again bemused and confused by the spectacle ...”

“... could not permit my mind to be profaned by such intellectual whorishness’) and wrote an essay on Paul Valéry instead. ‘To know you is a calamity,’ one of his classmates told him.Schwartz would sequester himself in his room, keen to ‘impress the boys with his habit of solitude and concentration of study’. His letters to Julian Sawyer, his only close ...”

“... a genre called Black Naturalism which encompassed such writers as Richard Wright, Ann Petry and Paul Laurence Dunbar. The Black Naturalists found naturalism a ready-made mode for representing life under white supremacy. For many Black Americans, there was always a boundary in sight, setting a limit on how prosperous they could be, how happy, how free. I can ...”

“... the seventh-century Bishop Eorpwald in Suffolk? They weren’t familiar with the novels of Angus Wilson. Alberto recollected that when council officials ushered around representatives of the Manhattan Loft Corporation, one day before the planning application went through for the conversion of Chatham Place into a monolith of aspiration, complete with ...”

“... kicking off with the overture to Susanna’s Secret by Wolf-Ferrari followed by Holst’s St Paul’s Suite. Through the concerts I regularly went to in Leeds Town Hall I was a fairly sophisticated music-lover and when the master in charge, the aptly named Mr Boor, said that he didn’t go for all this highbrow stuff, it was a small lesson that older ...”

“... newly independent Algerian parliament; Willy Brandt, the future chancellor of West Germany; Harold Wilson, on the eve of his first term as prime minister; and François Mitterrand, who as minister of justice approved the execution of at least forty Algerian nationalists during the independence struggle. A separate French protest was signed by Jean-...”

“... in New York in 1963, how sophisticated it seemed and how camp. He ends up by asking me, as Harold Wilson once did: ‘Were you one of the original four?’I wonder whether there were any shy, retiring Apostles: ‘Were you one of the original twelve?’Does the Holy Ghost resent God the Father and God the Son being better known (and certainly more ...”

“... Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia Srinivasan, Chaohua Wang, Marina Warner, Bee Wilson, Emily Witt Elif BatumanWhen​ Roe v. Wade was overturned, I was finishing the tour for my new novel, Either/Or. It’s a sequel to my first novel, The Idiot. Both books are set during my own college years, in the mid-1990s: a time when numerous people ...”

“... she was in sympathy with Mr Heath on everything except the Common Market, ‘I do think that Mr Wilson, personally, may have seen better in regard to Europe being on the opposition bench with less salary and being older, smaller and under less strain.’ She was vehemently opposed to the Common Market, the ‘common’ always underlined when she wrote about ...”