“... American literature. It was French condescension that celebrated Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Richard Wright, Erskine Caldwell, Dashiel Hammett and James M. Cain, Beauvoir was told, when the United States had its own sophisticated tradition of internal, psychological exploration; she was witnessing the formation of the American Studies canon ...”

“... the Fontana, the emulsion-on-hardboard multi-head portraits on which a generation of uncatalogued white moulds are breeding. The manifestos have been composed. It’s the time of the Art Wars (1990-93), and Tony Lowes, Philosopher, asserts that ‘to save the starving we must give up art.’ Wittgenstein, apparently, was of the same mind. That’s what it ...”

“... on that. Look, there are a lot of nice men out there, don’t let this thing spoil your life. Only white men are nice, she said. Or some of them. Not all that many, I said. I was walking on the slopes of Table Mountain that weekend when the call came through on my cell phone: there’d been another attempt to rape Jo. A neighbour phoned. An intruder had ...”

“... devices left around – the stage-directions, the Hollywood sets and props, or the drollery of white-furred crocodiles and cyanide shoes. But some of these devices are a bit nervous. ‘The Unconscious Imitated by a Cheesecake’ – chapter heading – was perhaps arrived at by chance, through aleatory techniques (not generally much in evidence in this ...”

“... not so much politicians as sublime social columnists who happened to sit in the House of Commons. Richard Crossman and Barbara Castle were heavyweights and professionals, and the eternal grind of committee life is reflected in their accounts. Yet both were writing with the special excitement of socialist voyeurs. Determined to expose the secrets of Whitehall ...”

“... and August 1789. The successive risings in the Vendée, the Lyon insurrection, the truly hideous White Terror in the Midi and the South-West in 1795, the actual invasions of Revolutionary France by émigré and foreign armies intent on re-establishing the monarchy, have been investigated by political, social and military historians. Far less attention has ...”

“... prove his point, Sperry and Miner took a patch of skin from tadpoles and replaced it so that the white belly skin grew up on the back. When these tadpoles metamorphosed to frogs, Sperry touched the skin on the back which months before had been on the belly, and the frogs scratched their bellies. Sperry and his collaborators extended these experiments to show ...”

“... to scaling the highest mountains, collecting the most species, and above all to standing where no (white) man had ever stood before, finding organisms hitherto ‘unknown to science’ or hacking his way through trackless jungle. Such a burning ambition to achieve glory, especially by testing himself physically to the limit, is not obvious from Wilson’s ...”

“... semi-abstract favourite of those who don’t really like abstraction, the tasteful and inoffensive Richard Diebenkorn. For a truly major artist who goes too far in abstract reduction, an artist like Barnett Newman, who made his reputation on large-scale monochrome canvases interrupted by a single contrasting line, and accompanied his vast ‘zips’ with a ...”

“... Elvis Presley’s top half on the Ed Sullivan Show; John F. Kennedy’s live debate with a melting Richard Nixon; an early episode of I Love Lucy; a dinner-table scene from The Waltons; Neil Armstrong’s One Small Step; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald; the pilot show of Roseanne. Each viewer wore headphones; all you could hear was the giggles and gasps. On ...”

“... of these musicians is a virtuoso of one or another aspect of pop. Yet the first book to appear, by Richard Witts, tackles the Velvet Underground. The Velvet Underground were decidedly not these kinds of virtuoso. There are confirmed music fans who can’t bear to listen to the songs considered their most characteristic (‘Heroin’, ‘Sister Ray’). With a ...”

“... images in newspapers and magazines. However, unlike their Pop predecessors (among whom Richard Hamilton must also be counted), Polke and Richter did not delight in mass media or commercial culture; they had fled East Germany, but were sceptical about the ‘economic miracle’ of West Germany. In two deadpan paintings from 1963-64, for ...”

“... in New York more than doubled the record price for a contemporary work when it sold Rothko’s White Centre (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) for $72.8 million; the following night, at Christie’s, Warhol’s Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) went for $71.7 million in a sale that fetched a record total of $384 million. Yves Klein, ‘IKB ...”

“... types of Englishmen and competing political tendencies; between little Englanders (such as Richard Cobden and John Bright) on the one hand and chauvinist imperialists (such as Lord Palmerston and Joseph Chamberlain) on the other; between a maritime and peaceful trading nation and a military-imperial superpower; between a petit-bourgeois ...”

“... a tale of flight, family separation and reunion scattered across the waters and cities of what Richard Halpern called ‘the decaying Hellenistic world’. At its core is the romance arc of a prince, Pericles (whose motto, In hac spe vivo, means ‘In this hope I live’), losing and then finding his wife and daughter: a wife seemingly buried at sea, but ...”