“... fact that neither of the other major parties to the Ulster conflict shares that anxiety. But the White Paper, Northern Ireland: A Framework for Devolution, pitches the issue intelligently in speaking of the ‘responsibility’, rather than the ‘right’, of the Northern Ireland people to run their own affairs. In offering a mechanism for progressive ...”

“... placed for shoulder. These lines and shapes precipitate a face, itself un-outlined, from out of white space, the unmistakable head of Harpo Marx. Turn a few more pages of Wendy Wick Reaves’s spectacular book Celebrity Caricature in America, the catalogue for an exhibition at the Smithsonian in Washington DC until 23 August, and you will also learn ...”

“... Life of LBJ reminds one, is something else again. Whereas British political biography, with the (white) elephantine exception of Martin Gilbert’s Churchill is, almost as a matter of professional pride, a one-volume affair, there is a well established American tradition of monumentalism, based, it seems, on the assumption that a blockbusting person requires ...”

“... touch his face for the last time, but the casket and its window had been sealed shut. On it lay a white flower, a single cut stem placed on the coffin’s wood by the undertaker. There was nothing unusual about it. But to Ayane it was extraordinary. Ten days earlier, at the height of her hope and despair, in an effort to escape her anxiety, Ayane had gone to ...”

“... US government – and the immensely detailed coverage of events which that length implies, The White House Years is hard to lay aside. This quality of readability will come as a surprise to those who have tackled the turgid prose of some of Dr Kissinger’s earlier works, which combined the worst excesses of the American academic style with an uncertain ...”

“... foreground whom at first we barely notice: a typical Poussin figure, half-asleep on the ground, white-haired and a little overweight: as if death, if we’re lucky, will be a long weary half-consciousness of water still flowing (the figure is a river god holding a jar whose contents spill through his fingers) and a shelf of grass. Death is everywhere at ...”

“... an artist since the extensive surgery that followed his shooting by Valerie Solanas (the first was Richard Avedon) and Neel shows him looking diminutive, eyes closed, hands barely sketched and his left knee unpainted, as if his body is coming or going, or both. The scars criss-crossing his torso are picked out in flecks of pink. Light seems to radiate from his ...”

“... on the South Side from James Farrell’s trilogy; the block of South Drexel where Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son killed and incinerated his rich employer’s daughter; Nelson Algren’s Division Street; the train station where Louis Armstrong was met by King Oliver’; and the Panther Room of the Sherman Hotel, which was a notable touring venue ...”

“... tiny artworks made from split lengths of human hair, collected by the artist Susan Hiller, to Richard Wentworth’s snapshots of traffic cones or abandoned gloves or old boots. Some of the objects are related in theme: to go with the Arctic tusk and its story of loss, there’s also a king penguin Shackleton brought back from the other pole, now stiff as ...”

“... involution of photography, truth and fabrication.All of this is playfully explored in a black and white film that matches the artist’s footage of the loch and its environs with an actor’s solemn intonation of Nessie-spotters’ reports. The latter are full of markers of precision, aspiring to the status of evidence: ‘11.45 a.m. on 22 June 1971 … three ...”

“... fucked-up teenager who despised everything she and her chip-off-the-old-block, conformist, Cliff-Richard-adoring teenage daughter smugly stood for. I do see how awful it was for her, but I hate her, still and nevertheless.She was more or less out of my life by 1962, but the ‘ordinary provincial English housewife’ pattern, which I hadn’t come across ...”

“... what the book group would make of Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, or Raymond Carver, or Richard Yates’s reissued Revolutionary Road, a whole novel about a married couple arguing. What about Alice Munro? Could she attract them, truthful, small-scale and brilliant as she is? Or would they not have it, the clear reflection of the quotidian, the ...”

“... president’s deference to fundamentalist passions as the price of keeping one of their own in the White House. The therapeutic hopes aroused by stem-cell research, however, have shifted political alignments. Nancy Reagan, mourning her husband’s death from Alzheimer’s disease, received public support when she endorsed the expansion of stem-cell ...”

“... high command when it conveyed Lenin back to Russia in that sealed train. In the Watergate affair, Richard Nixon scored not one but two own goals: first, by organising a burglary which could produce only minimal gain for the Republicans if it worked but would destroy him if it went wrong; then by secretly recording his conversations in the ...”

“... had a particularly intimate relationship with power. But one of the fascinating paradoxes of Richard Aldous’s biography is how slight Schlesinger’s influence in Washington actually was, despite his own pride in it, when compared to his influence on the American reading public, which he counted for nothing. In his later years, Schlesinger was best ...”