“... and inbred sophistications of Irish literature. One of the most telling essays is written by Michael Hartnett, who, some years ago, switched from writing poetry in English to writing in Irish. Hartnett confesses himself to be ‘obsessed by the work and mind of Daibhi O Bruadair’ (David Broderick or Brouder), the 17th-century poet from the Limerick ...”

“... with a media whose quarrel with Corbyn has been described by a former chair of the BBC Trust, Michael Lyons, as ‘quite extraordinary’. The favourite – and perhaps the most persistent – of the many lines of attack employed so far is the charge of antisemitism. No one has yet produced any evidence either that antisemitism is more prevalent in the ...”

“... Jewish state and smuggled out by Teddy Kollek, later mayor of Jerusalem, with the help of Meyer Lansky, the mobster whose associates controlled the New York waterfront; Frank Sinatra, who had Zionist sympathies as well as Mafia connections, acted as bagman. As leader of the opposition, Churchill was less impressive than Attlee, chiding the government ...”

“... The main vehicle for all of this was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, ‘run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from 1950 till 1967’. My first encounter (pun unintended) with the Congress was through The God that Failed, a compendium of confessions by well-known former Communists (and/or sympathisers) that included Gide, Silone and Koestler; it was ...”

“... painting looked even more absurd than it did before. As critics such as Douglas Crimp and Richard Meyer have stressed, this queering of art was also a matter of content. If the persona behind Abstract Expressionism was the ‘action painter’ in existential torment, Warhol put pretty-boy idols of mass culture up front, such as the young Troy Donahue and ...”

“... one of the most bitter debates Christian scholars are now engaged in. For the past ten years Michael Goulder has been scandalising conservative theologians by his insistence that the Hebrew liturgy and lectionary is the principal key to the organisation, not merely of late Old Testament books, such as Chronicles, but even of the Gospels and ...”

“... with Crows had to be contended with, perhaps as it was described in a book by another friend, Meyer Schapiro. (Schapiro’s Van Gogh was published by Abrams in 1950: his description of Wheatfield with Crows has never been bettered.)Wheatfield with Crows, Cane Field with Revolutionary … Suburb in Havana is a title, not a painting. Sometimes titles ...”

“... common are gangsters. Gatsby’s fortune is secretly derived from his bootlegging partnership with Meyer Wolfsheim, a character based on the mobster Arnold Rothstein, who fixed the 1919 World Series. Trump’s business has been dependent almost from the start on real-life racketeers. There was Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime ...”

“... compromise with the new Post-Modern order: though he never fell into the historical pastiche of Michael Graves or Charles Moore, he did become more imagistic in his design. The great interest of this retrospective is to trace his passage from the early grunge work, through an elliptical Pop style, to the lavish ‘gestural aesthetic’ of the present. For ...”

“... circuit – at Stockholm in 1960, where he had been introduced by the Cambridge Medieval historian Michael Postan, another Eastern European and the man who discovered Marc Bloch for English-speaking historians – ended in open conflict on the congress floor when the West Germans, led by Vittinghoff with Joseph Vogt in the background, made a ruthless attempt ...”

“... appreciation of the art of our time than Picasso the Charlatan. But the curious fact is that when Michael Ayrton in the Fifties or John Berger in the Sixties tried to react to the generally unctuous tone of what passed for Picasso criticism, they produced essays which rebounded more on themselves than on Picasso, though these are among the finest writers on ...”

“... inside J.C. Penney’s or Costco or Safeway, they’ve looked hardly less exotic than poor Michael Dukakis did on board his ill-advised tank. But the moment that Sarah Palin stepped up to the mike at the Republican Convention in St Paul, and began talking in her homely, mezzo-soprano, Far Western twang, she showed herself to be incontestably the real ...”