“... it on the wall for long periods without touching it. It exists in two versions, one now in the Whitney Museum, the other in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The photograph also survives, guarding its own pathos and dim beauty. All three show him as a boy with smooth hair and a neat coat, holding a small bouquet in well-articulated fingers. He is ...”

“... of its block. The American Folk Art Museum fell in its march west to Sixth Avenue, and only Saint Thomas Church has blocked its access east to Fifth.MoMA has added 47,000 square feet of exhibition space, a 30 per cent increase for a new total of 165,000 square feet in more than sixty galleries, at a cost of $450 million. Roughly half of this great sum came ...”

“... most but rather those that do not seem to have been the most widely mentioned. The exclusion of Thomas Hart Benton is tantamount to leaving Steinbeck out of a survey of the modern American novel. The exclusion of Mark Tobey has to be the result of amnesia (or megalomania). The exclusion of Dorothea Tanning as of every other exponent of post-de Chirico ...”

“... figures such as Leibniz and Wordsworth, as well as more obscure ones like Destutt de Tracy and Thomas Sprat, historian of the Royal Society. In each case Aarsleff never fails to say something interesting or to bring out some nuance in the part they played as contributors to the thread of history he is trying to follow through. Probably the most intriguing ...”

“... galaxy of cartoon characters – Silver Anderson, Mannon Cable, Jack Python, Jade Johnson, Whitney Valentine – lurks an italicised sub-plot. This tells of an unnamed victim of sexual abuse who falls into the quite plausible routine of torching her abusers to a charred crisp in their own homes. When Ms Collins moves to end her book, she simply causes ...”

“... America; Hardwick waited for the episode to pass. Lowell was conducting the affair from the Payne Whitney Clinic, to which he had been committed after his third breakdown. ‘The whole business was sincere enough,’ he told a friend after his release from hospital and return to Hardwick, ‘but a stupid pathological mirage, a magical orange grove in a ...”

“... of Ginsberg and Cassady and Kerouac, were not invited to take their place on the walls of the Whitney Museum for the Beat Generation wake. In the main room, a low occasional table had been turned into a kind of altar: candles and fastidiously aligned stacks of books. This was Carolyn’s current reading matter, the titles she was happy to display. Alan ...”