“... model galleon sat on a table. Photos of him meeting foreign dignitaries were framed on the wall: John McCain, Vladimir Putin, Jens Stoltenberg.Đukanović stared at me intently during our conversation; a fat watch slid up and down his left wrist as he spoke. ‘Serbia always thought of us as the annoying little rock in their shoe,’ he said, explaining that ...”

“... with Oslo-style diplomacy) has become a respectable part of public discourse. Israel has played a major part in the neoconservative turn of American foreign policy. No one can discount the role of its lobbyists in building support for what would once have been considered extreme and dangerous foreign policy adventurism. But the Israel lobby could never have ...”

“... around £3.3 billion, but its apologists (cursing critics as spoil-sports) speak airily of how all major construction projects come in a whisker over budget. Look at the Channel Tunnel, the Limehouse Link. Look at any of the enforced from above, late-century civil engineering achievements. Look at anything deriving from the key icon of the era, Margaret ...”

“... Dwight Macdonald recalled. He was simply, bathetically, Delmore. Schwartz once conceded to John Berryman that ‘Delmorean’ would be the word used should his ‘verse prove attractive to posterity’. Posterity has not proved kind, something Ben Mazer’s edition of Schwartz’s Collected Poems sets out to redress. But this sprawling volume is no ...”

“... Her three husbands had 20 wives. Sinatra seems to have been the serious one. Shooting Mogambo, John Ford gave a party for the British Governor of Uganda and his wife. A man’s man, as they say, Ford thought of a little joke to put Ava on the spot. ‘Why don’t you tell the Governor what you see in that hundred-twenty-pound runt you’re married ...”

“... Queen’s Counsel. Still, as long as it’s men in wigs ... The real problem is the one to which John Griffith and others have repeatedly called attention: that the judiciary comes very largely from a tranche of society whose values, culture, données and attitudes are homogeneous because they are socially and educationally inbred. Less attention has perhaps ...”

“... panicked. One evening, just after I had dug my slit trench, word came that a nearby German major would be pleased to give dinner to a British officer in captivity. My host, with one eye, one arm, the Iron Cross with oakleaves, talked in a strained voice of the epic experience of war. Were we British, he wanted to know, terrified by the roar of the ...”

“... his life, work and influence on a variety of artists, from Marcel Duchamp to Michel Foucault, John Ashbery to Georges Perec. I recently spent several months working my way through this enormous archive in the stately gloom of the ornately carved Salon de Manuscrits on the first floor of the Bibliothéque Nationale, just down from the Bourse where Roussel ...”

“... families of their donors), and it would soon give rise to a distinct interior aesthetic. Just as John Fowler, who would become the Trust’s favoured ‘decorator’ in the late Fifties, scorned the idea of ‘design’, James Lees-Milne distinguished the true country-house interior from the ‘contrived “old world” flavour’ of an architect like ...”

“... than with the interests of reason and truth. Territorial imperatives were clearly at stake when John Searle (in a recent number of the New York Review of Books) gave a simplified account of Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction, and used it to launch an attack on this whole new breed of overweening literary theorists. From this point of view, deconstruction ...”

“... supposedly of the couple’s pots and pans, a bust of Cahun by Chana Orloff. The underbidder was John Berger, which suggests that there was some art-world knowledge of Cahun and Moore even then. Perhaps rebelling against a subtitle giving Moore equal creative status, Stevenson disposes of the idea that she made a contribution to the photographs, basing his ...”

“... He insisted on collective responsibility, even assembling a large, argumentative team to draft his major speeches. ‘What Stalin and Khrushchev had achieved with terror and humiliation, Brezhnev pushed through with his joviality and conviviality.’ His reign, which would last for almost twenty years, is often dismissed today as ‘the era of ...”

“... or did it require a narrative looking beyond Gnosticism to Zoroaster? Gibbon cites three major scholars as guiding his history of the early Church: Jean Le Clerc, a Genevan exile living in Amsterdam, Isaac de Beausobre, a Huguenot exile living in Berlin, and Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, a professor in the Lutheran universities of Helmstedt and ...”

“... of the Various Nations of the Known World, and decided then and there to write an epic about each major religion. Of the long poems in this edition, each several thousand lines long, Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) is a supposedly Islamic romance, Madoc (1805) sets Aztecs against Welsh Christians, and The Curse of Kehama (1810) takes on a lividly distorted ...”

“... sidelined in a print edition of one of her poems. Franklin, ironically, would undertake the next major print edition of Dickinson’s poetry. Old envelopes​ were just one of the many types of discarded paper on which Dickinson, particularly in her later, post-fascicle years, jotted down lines of poetry, so this book offers only a sample of the vast ...”