“... bluebells? There are further guest appearances by Proust, Freud, Virginia Woolf, Ramsay Mac Donald, Winston Churchill and other ‘stars’, and it is not every pair of Cockney youngsters who travel to France, as Amos and Zak do, in a laundry-basket full of General Haig’s underpants. All this is good fun, but the dialogue is sometimes inexcusably ...”

“... is astoundingly gullible with regard to the so-called Monks of Medmenham: he depends wholly on Donald McCormick’s valueless book on the Hell Fire Club, and does not seem aware that Betty Kemp has called into question the entire existence of the group as such. To set these things aside is not to do very much, because the great majority of the book deals ...”

“... alloy with a sphere gleaming at its zenith – Rolling Moon. In black felt-tip near its base I read: ‘I will always love my beloved boyfriend Alan Cousins for eva 12.5.91.’ Is this vandalism? According to the recently retired maestro of Grizedale, the forester Bill Grant, only one thing has ever been destroyed there: the crows, which were trashed by a ...”

“... him as a man by telling the story of his brief life in the outlaw’s own voice. And to read the story is to see why he isn’t surprised that it should end in hanging: ‘I were but 14 1/2 yr. old … but … I were already travelling full tilt towards the man I would become.’ Kelly was born c.1855, the oldest son of Irish Catholics, his mother a ...”

“... currently teaching in Atlanta.) His first book, The Political Economy of Slavery (1965), could be read as an attack on Southern 19th-century ‘progress’, about which regional historians had long boasted. Genovese argued instead that a pre-capitalist order under slaveholder control prevented the rise of a powerful middle class, hobbled industrial growth and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... God Wears a Durag’.) Did you know she’d performed at Tate Modern and MoMA? Did you read the piece she wrote about experiencing racism with her family at a Kraftwerk gig? (The culprits were fellow audience members, not the K-workers.) She goes out of her way to promote particular artists, designers, authors. Recently, she set up an online ...”