“... American Wife is being contrasted with the Oliver Stone movie, W., in which Bush is portrayed by Josh Brolin as a drunken buffoon who turns his life around, becoming a sober, powerful and born-again buffoon. Sittenfeld, a Democrat and a liberal, may be doing more to humanise the Bush administration than all the press ...”

“... reject the delusions of Reaganomics, Thatcherism, Blairism and the World Bank? If Blackburn is to be believed, pensions are the Achilles’ heel of capitalism. Despite the subtitle of his book, Blackburn is concerned more with the current crisis and its resolution than with the long history of pensions. He identifies two pension traditions, the ...”

“... things, and our early experiences of its forms and pleasures are unlikely to have been prompted by artworks unless we were surrounded by them in early childhood. My own memories of intense sensation – the painful experience of touching very cold things, say, for me indelibly associated with plunging my hands into ...”

“... For an old Red like me, bowed down by years of Thatcher, Reagan, Clinton and Blair, these two books are full of exhilaration and hope. George Monbiot writes mainly about Britain in a terse investigative style that I had feared was out of date. Naomi Klein, based in Canada, ranges all over the world and writes infectiously with verve and passion ...”

“... In the United States, ‘English’ can mean ‘spin’: a deliberate turn put on a ball by striking it so that it swerves. It’s a subtle epithet, perhaps recording a canny colonial take on the larger distortions inseparable from imperial rule. But the truth is that as the English invented ‘Great Britain’ and then began the process of large-scale colonisation, they put quite a lot of English on ‘Englishness’ itself ...”

“... father and uncles and cousins to Marlborough, where he was the 21st Leach, but he turned out to be the first who was unable to hit a cricket ball or bring down a pheasant, and accordingly was miserable. He found his years there even more dreadful than his time as a guerrilla in Burma during the war. At home he was under the thumb of his mother, much younger ...”

“... I never heard of such a thing before,’ and received the reply: ‘Haven’t you? Oh, it is by no means uncommon.’ Barrett Browning noted, also, that ‘Miss Cushman has an unimpeachable character.’ Cushman not only had a public partnership with Hays and, after her, with the sculptor Emma Stebbins, but a long secret affair with a young woman who ...”

“... Telegraph. ‘Something bad [was said] on the field: “You’re a black cunt.” Then another ran by and said: “It’s the truth, you’re nothing but that.”’ He said that he would not play again unless he received an apology and was convinced that the Gaelic Athletic Association was serious about stamping out sectarianism. Few people outside his own ...”

“... year. Success of a sort followed. Hopper’s painting of a tall, old-fashioned house, cut off by the modern encroachment of a railroad track, was the first painting acquired by the new Museum of Modern Art, and he had his first retrospective there three years later, in 1933. His watercolours and canvases were snapped up ...”

“... and shits in America’. The group included Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr and David Kammerer. In August 1944, Carr stabbed and killed Kammerer. Near the end of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a lightly fictionalised and surprisingly engaging account of the murder and of the months leading up to it, written in 1945 ...”

“... that despises them … I lived in the monster and know its entrails – and my sling is that of David.’ The next day he was killed by Spanish troops at the battle of Dos Ríos. For three more years the Cubans fought alone against the Spanish. Then, in April 1898, the United States entered the war against a now exhausted ...”

“... refers to as the ‘ubiquitous cigarette’ (recte, the inevitable cigarette: it may always be there, but it knows its place) looks shrunken to a bidi. ‘Quappi in Grey’ (1948) I take Beckmann to be one of the great painters of the 20th century, his life one of the great 20th-century artists’ lives, and his ...”

“... project as a neighbourly fence that made the most of its unattractive character, often by pretending it had nothing to do with exclusion. The fence, the New York Times said, could be reconceived as ‘a horizon of opportunity, not as a barrier’. The ‘glass forest’ border designed ...”

“... pleasures are on offer when Caravaggio paints a glass vase in the National Gallery’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard or a basket of fruit in Supper at Emmaus (the latter, painted in 1601, has been hung next to The Taking of Christ from 1602.) This, after all, was the young Lombard’s calling card when Roman patrons led ...”

“... Before he began to eat, the book was No. 66 on Amazon. Fire and Fury wasn’t yet on sale. By the end of lunch it was No. 1. The next day you could get copies in London. Not that long afterwards, it was No. 1 in Germany. Resentment broke out, as if Wolff, who has written mostly about the media in the past, had stolen a subject from the seasoned ...”