“... intensifying ‘culture wars’ between ‘red’ and ‘blue’ states, and between rural and urban communities, Slotkin identifies the banking crisis of 2007-8, the Covid pandemic and changes in the racial and ethnic make-up of the American population. To these familiar culprits he adds a deeper problem: a lack of unifying ‘national myths’ that ...”

“... is ‘beautiful’, the concept of beauty dissolves – it is so much the sentimentality of an urban culture that fears what it has lost.In the fashion-needy world of American film, Malick was in danger of being forgotten. And Bleasdale sees no reason to claim he was hurt by that or felt compelled to return to work. Still, after twenty years he did ...”

“... but he mostly wrote genre fiction: existential potboilers, family dramas, ribald comedies, urban noirs. His prose was lean and gritty, and his plots often so dense with incident that they were difficult to follow. The intellectual seriousness of Ellison, the prophetic eloquence of Baldwin, the allegorical fire of Wright: these high notes eluded ...”

“... frightened by the uprisings in Harlem, Watts, Newark and other places as they were by the rise of urban crime and heroin use. As Nixon’s advisor H.R. Haldeman recalled, Nixon ‘emphasised that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognises this while not appearing to.’ The ...”

“... from Camp Abu Naji and the vehicles trundled along a dimly lit road. ‘It was a sort of urban area but with a lot of waste ground,’ Blackett says. ‘A few buildings on the road, a few shops, and very dark. Very few people. It was one of the roads leading out of town.’ ‘He was happy. He seemed cheerful,’ says Guardsman Gary Alderson, who was ...”

“... cultural history of a parish, assembled from the inside. This material is selected and analysed in George Deacon’s John Clare and the Folk Tradition, one of the most informative and valuable studies of Clare’s poetry yet to appear. The total oeuvre proves him to have been an observer of his rural habitat on the same scale as Turner, though Clare’s ...”

“... is then flung out of the window.Had Harriet G. not told me the story I would put it down as an urban myth. But it isn’t, the most chilling part of the saga the syringe changing hands for £1 as a profitable investment. The social worker who took him to hospital deserves the George Medal, but he’s more likely to be ...”

“... included Henry Moore, Ceri Richards, William Roberts, Josef Herman, David Bomberg, L.S. Lowry, George Fullard and Frank Auerbach, together with the Dutchman Friso ten Holt. Of these, only the enthusiastic review of Lowry is included in the new collection, which is overwhelmingly dominated by French-based artists.Francis Bacon, whose work Berger reviewed in ...”

“... how Tom comes to know it, too, as I’m sure boxing isn’t his thing. 22 January. I’m reading George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books, a series of chapters, some more autobiographical than others, on the books he wishes he’d written. The first section is on the Cambridge scholar and scientist Joseph Needham, microbiologist and expert on China, a man who ...”

“... role in what was supposed to be a French war from an impeccable source – the CIA. George Allen worked on Indochina from 1949 to 1975, by far the longest involvement of any American, a fly on the wall at the decisions of a quarter-century. Allen is a real-life quiet American who saw his job as answering the questions he was asked, without ...”

“... V has demonstrated her hatred for me in the past and would do anything to see me accused. For George + Frances to go through life knowing their father had stood in the dock for attempted murder would be too much. When they are old enough to understand explain to them the dream of paranoia, and look after them. So Lucan is signing off. There was another ...”

“... years younger than himself whom he calls ‘Dick’ in Goodbye to All That – his real name was George Harcourt Johnstone. Graves always claimed their relationship was ‘chaste and sentimental’ and responded with fury when reprimanded for ogling Johnstone during chapel. In the trenches Johnstone’s weekly letters came to symbolise the ideal of pure ...”

“... we want treating like that.’ The chairman of the South Yorkshire Police Committee, Councillor George Moores, then spoke. Youngsters ‘come into the force as decent chaps and we send them away to training centres and they come back like Nazi storm-troopers.’ After listening to over an hour of complaints against the Police, the Deputy Chief Constable ...”

“... the impact of circumstances on men. Unlike the old, the ‘new’ history – economic, social, urban and demographic – explores people as categories, groups, statistics, abstractions, rather than as flesh-and-blood beings. ‘Mere’ biography is dismissed as attributing an unmerited significance to the trivial doings of trivial individuals. At best, it ...”

“... from the start. Staring them in the face. I. Penman. A modest assertion, registered anonymity. George Gissing reborn on the cusp of punk. Penman was gifted with a Grub Street membership card at a time when Grub Street had been decommissioned. The slender ego of that single initial protected the man from any possibility of worldly success. Puffed up with ...”