“... 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 ...”

“... Among the critics of Obama’s policies towards the auto industry is the Democratic Representative John Dingell of Michigan, the longest serving member of the House, and a long-time ally of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. ‘I’m troubled by the different treatment of auto companies … and the treatment of those good-hearted people such as AIG and all ...”

“... and where by the early 1920s both the poet laureate Robert Bridges and the future poet laureate John Masefield had established themselves in suburban comfort. Graves lived from 1919 to 1921 in Dingle Cottage at the bottom of Masefield’s garden. I walk my dog past the cottage quite often. It’s set down in a marshy hollow which has a faint air of primal ...”

“... or ‘neo-authoritarian’, what is indisputable is that it has unleashed what John Ganz has called a sense of ‘moral anarchy’, in which there are no longer any limits to the expression of sadism, or to its implementation as policy. Children are forcibly separated from their parents. Migrants from Venezuela are flown to a concentration ...”

“... cannot think already to keep them from thinking’. Moore was echoed by the Superior Court judge John Fauntleroy, one of DC’s first black justices, and by Andrew Fowler, an influential black pastor. That Clarke was white made the policy of decriminalisation particularly susceptible to attack. Some, like Moore, suspected a plot to weaken blacks (he would ...”

“... be considered a discovery of the 1990s. The first big show of his work I saw was in 1996; in 1999, John Ashbery published a book-length poem entitled Girls on the Run, the cover of which bore an arresting Darger watercolour showing some of the Vivian Girls in panic-stricken flight. The ‘literariness’ and epic ‘virtual world’ quality of Darger’s work ...”

“... 1962. The other was The New Poetry, also published in 1962. Edited by A. Alvarez, it had a crazy Jackson Pollock painting on the cover. In the Allott anthology I was intrigued by some of the poems that came towards the end, most notably Jon Silkin’s ‘Death of a Son’, whose last line (‘And out of his eyes two great tears rolled, like stones, and he ...”

“... tried to calm things down. A fair analogy may come from the 1850s, when the party of Jefferson and Jackson embraced slavery as their vote-getter, while the new Republicans, descendants of the Federalist Party of Adams and Washington, took their stand on anti-slavery and free labour. ‘I remember once being much amused,’ Lincoln wrote in a letter of 1859, at ...”

“... receive the royal nod. Instead, Roth chose Blake Bailey, the well-regarded biographer of Charles Jackson (The Lost Weekend), Richard Yates and John Cheever, three alcohol-plagued novelists whose torments kept late hours. As it happened Atlas would outlive Roth only by a year, dying in September 2019 from complications of a ...”

“... American counterparts. Presidential candidates, with the exception of George McGovern and Jesse Jackson, outbid each other in paeans of praise for Israel. The Administration has refurbished the strategic ‘understanding’ it made with Israel during Alexander Haig’s time as Secretary of State, as if the invasion had never happened, the theory being ...”

“... was the summer of 1993. Her 25th novel was just being published, and she was working at her last, Jackson’s Dilemma. Who was Jackson? Puss asked her, but she could not tell. ‘I don’t think he’s been born yet,’ she said, at which Puss, accustomed to finding her amusing, was amused. The beginning was too mild, too ...”

“... view the prevailing one in the Supreme Court. In 1971, a justice who cherished traditional values, John Harlan, wrote for the Court: ‘The constitution’s right of free expression is powerful medicine ... It is designed to remove governmental restraints from the arena of public discussion ... in the hope that use of such freedom will ultimately produce a ...”

“... acts, artists presumed dead or missing in action, for Norma Desmond divas and the real Michael Jackson, a trembling skin-graft mask cursed with eternal youth. Parrot-scream arias and the cough of angry engines, as punters try to exit the gridlocked car park, carry across a broad expanse of oily water. Thames, Amazon, Congo: crumbling regimes like nothing ...”

“... Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), his influential study of elitism in 20th-century literature, John Carey writes about the ‘duplicity’ of Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel supposedly about love for the common man, but written in such a forbidding way that the common man is unlikely to read it. Well, The Lord of the Rings is the opposite. It is a work written ...”

“... Ellsworth Kelly – fellow Abstract Expressionists seeking a new way forward after the death of Jackson Pollock – Martin won acclaim for her delicate, somewhat cerebral experiments in geometric form. She was touted by the critics and attracted the attention of wealthy collectors. Success notwithstanding, however, Martin was repulsed by art-world ...”