“... As Lahav says, Meir must have been aware of the work of the Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner, whose ‘frontier thesis’ saw settler colonialism as a defining feature of American progress. In May 1921, Meir and Morris travelled from New York to Italy on the USS Pocahontas. On a second boat from Brindisi to Egypt, they fell in with some ...”

“... a record label, bought the movie rights. The subsequent film, which starred Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, as well as Richard Pryor and Lena Horne, was a commercial and critical flop. But it became classic holiday viewing for many Black Americans, including my family. The Wiz is set in late 1970s New York, dingy and rundown, full of dilapidated tenements of ...”

“... Federation and was scornful of the religious and political eclecticism of a Tom Mann or a Ben Tillett. Instead, it drew upon the pure and uncontaminated Marxism that it found in the writings of the American socialist, Daniel De Leon. It was from De Leon’s Two Pages of Roman History that the name of the League was coined, and the watchwords of De ...”

“... to keep out foreign imports, and foreigners too, in the sort of language the president uses, which Ben Chu quotes at the start of his sharp analysis of modern tariff mania: ‘There never has been a time in the history of the United States when tariff protection was more essential to the welfare of the American people than at present.’ Such a plonking plank ...”

“... painting and its feverish gestures; mainstream critics, who had finally come around to Jackson Pollock and company, were not happy about this turn of events. In 1949 Life had showcased Pollock under the banner: ‘Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?’ In 1964 the same magazine profiled Lichtenstein under the heading: ‘Is He ...”

“... Krasner hearing a book go hurtling across the studio next to hers, smashing against a wall, and Jackson Pollock emerging with the words: ‘Goddamn it! That guy has done everything. There’s nothing left.’ But the further point of the anecdote is that Pollock did find ways, eventually, to turn the ‘everything’ to his advantage. That was partly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ideas: Adorno the grouch, Adorno the scourge of mass media, Adorno the mandarin Marxist; or, as Ben Watson puts it in his counterweight, Adorno for Revolutionaries (2011), Adorno as ‘a kind of German T.S. Eliot without the practical cats’.Adorno’s aesthetics are extreme. ‘He is an easy man to caricature,’ Watson writes, ‘because he believed in ...”

“... that already in early 19th-century Yorkshire, children were being baptised with diminutives: Fred, Ben, Willie, Joe, Tom. Everywhere, some names could be given to both girls and boys – Hilary, Evelyn, Lesley, Happy, Providence – and the practice of using surnames as forenames was well established. Particular groups have periodically used this customary ...”

“... agent and write the Great American Novel into the bargain,’ Matthiessen wrote to his friend Ben Bradlee. ‘Weren’t you ever as young and dumb as that?’ ‘I’m always in the club drinking martinis,’ he told an interviewer when asked to recall his younger self. ‘What did I know from politics?’ (Richardson doesn’t find in Matthiessen’s ...”

“... out the lies and bunglings of the Bush shower. After his speech the crowd was on its feet. Jesse Jackson appeared like a pantomime ghost from behind Kucinich and the progressives stood on their chairs. ‘What do George Bush and John Kerry have in common?’ Jackson asked. ‘Answer: they both want to be elected president ...”

“... won’t do here, either. We had Bob Hope there, of course. We were lucky, we didn’t have Jesse Jackson like we’re gonna have here.’ I asked how the funding worked. ‘Well, Washington has this idea that democracy is something you can sorta buy. They say: will it be free and fair? If we say no, not really, they say: well how much more do we have to ...”

“... troops in 2012. So severe was this spate of scandal that on 8 November the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, summoned the army board to an extraordinary meeting to address ‘core and cultural issues’. Carleton-Smith responded by announcing that an independent audit would be carried out ‘to reinforce the best and weed out the worst’.The next step came ...”

“... at the time of the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, when ‘700,000 Jews’, in the words of David Ben-Gurion, were ‘pitted against 27 million Arabs – one against forty’ and the US joined a UN arms embargo on the region despite the fact that the Arab armies had a clear advantage in terms of weaponry. Even the CIA and the US Secretary of State George ...”

“... Mark Rothko). He came to know William Baziotes and later, through Rothko, Clyfford Still, and then Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt. According to Motherwell, the group opposed art dedicated either to ‘social values’ or to formalist aesthetics, and they agreed that ‘the function of the artist is to make actual the ...”