“... Painting’, which he wrote twenty years later, as the 20th century’s most widely read piece of art criticism. Partisan Review published ‘Towards a Newer Laocoön’ a few months after ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’. Greenberg set out his stall in these two essays: the best art of modern times – roughly, after 1850 – had no interest in ...”

“... when it proved difficult not to join in his merriment. When he officiated at burials, he would read out psalms by the graveside in such a droll manner that some mourners had to stifle their laughter. Bell-ringing was another of his obsessions. He would set off in heavy rain to walk a mile from his house to ring the bells at a church when someone died. As ...”

“... where – at least in theory – any Korean can come and attend classes, use a computer or read a book. At the entrance, the revolving door had jammed and the rusted metal entranceway was being spray-painted silver, like the set of a school play. The fumes were very strong. Inside, I was taken into some English classes. In one, a group of ...”

“... public consciousness, but there was renewed interest in what happened there after the election of Donald Trump, as commentators and historians scrambled to locate the roots of MAGA politics. The connection between Waco, hard-right militia groups and conspiracist media outfits is easily made. The white supremacist Timothy McVeigh travelled to Waco during the ...”

“... the prefaces and acknowledgments were ripped away; if you’d never watched American television or read the US papers; if all you had were the texts and you read them from cover to cover, would you know who Bob Woodward is? No, you wouldn’t, but if you read the jackets, acknowledgments ...”

“... consultant with experience working in Moscow, Carter Page was named a national security adviser to Donald Trump’s campaign in March 2016. In July, he travelled to Moscow, where he delivered a speech critical of US foreign policy and greeted a top Russian official. The FBI received secret permission to conduct surveillance of Page starting in October ...”

“... alone.’Yet Church was right: Elsie was central to Stevens’s poethood, although she refused to read his later poetry and resented his literary success. As part of his five-year courtship of her he composed a pair of 20-poem sequences, ‘Book of Verses’, which he presented to her on her 22nd birthday in 1908, and ‘The Little June Book’, given the ...”

“... Sartre wrote in 1957, more than seventy years after Karl Marx’s death. Sartre had first read Marx three decades earlier when he, too, was still very young. At the time, the author of Capital had seemed a figure of merely historical interest. ‘Here are the conceptions of a German intellectual who lived in London in the middle of the last ...”

“... these Soviet spies, who probably recruited Kim Philby, to Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Philby dropped all his communist contacts and joined the pro-Nazi Anglo-German Fellowship, which made it easier for him to get access to Franco’s forces in Spain as a ‘journalist’. Berzin and Ludwik were both in Spain in 1936, in the hope ...”

“... categories: stages of the disease that comported with chances of survival. In the 1960s Donald Gleason, a pathologist working for the US Veterans Administration developed the eponymous Gleason five-stage scale for assessing prostate cancer; it’s now one of hundreds of similar systems based on pathological and genetic analysis. A gigantic web of ...”

“... he writes and can give no reason for his using a fine expression, or a beautiful idea: if you read Poetry to him, he’ll exclaim at each delicate expression ‘beautiful! fine!’ but can give no reason: yet is always correct and just in his remarks. He is low in stature – long visage – light hair – coarse features – ungaitly – awkward – is a ...”

“... tiny but affecting mutual spark of deeply human recognition? Not all that long, unless you have to read through it. In his manifesto of enthusiasm for Zola’s notebook tactics and shoe-leather research (the sort of ‘research’ that he himself so laboriously demonstrates in the agonising White-Jordan dialogue above), Wolfe did not find room to recommend ...”

“... wedding – no minor character or plot line is left unturned. Austenians not only buy and read these books, they maintain a lively conversation, in person and online, about sequels, continuations, adaptations and completions. ‘The sequel,’ Gérard Genette wrote in Palimpsests, ‘differs from a continuation in that it continues a work not in order ...”

“... possession of properties that have a particular relation to one’s own properties’. I have read and reread these definitions without getting much light on the second one. It is not just that I find sociological prose cloying, but that I have a nasty suspicion that this book is trying to measure the disappearance of something visible only to the eye of ...”

“... novel is called in an act of homage to Supertramp, sets its tone effectively before we start to read with an evocative jacket illustration. Pink clouds portending passion and doom mass over a pleasantly green West Riding landscape, while a man and a woman, with their backs turned, contemplate the view over a workmanlike stretch of dry-stonewalling. It seems ...”