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“... at the Guggenheim. Designed by the Post-Modern artist Robert Wilson, who has draped the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral ramps with white gauze, bathed the museum in patchouli and musk, and created a Japanese soundtrack to accompany the show, the exhibition is a perfect example of the blend of fashion, art, commerce and academic analysis that marks the ...”

“... sliced-thin sentences leaving a trail of stitches – maximalists like Moody follow the lead of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo by wiring themselves into consumer culture, conspiracy theory, pop iconography and spy-craft technology, trying to chart an underlying pattern in the chaos, a treasure map of paranoia. Purple America, Moody’s major-statement novel ...”

“... to emulate his perfect humanity. This blend of scepticism and devotion caused Emerson’s friend Thomas Carlyle to dismiss Unitarians as ‘halfway house characters’ who deserve the ‘bat fate: to be killed among the rats as a bird, among the birds as a rat’.Emerson nested comfortably among the bats at first. He became minister of Boston’s historic ...”

“... succeeded him, Ken Livingstone. ‘A gimmick’. A megalomaniac right-wing fantasy. By 2008, in a frank admission during the run-up to the mayoral election, Livingstone boasted that he had feigned enthusiasm for the 2012 Olympics as a way of generating funds for brownfield development in East London and Thames Gateway, seeding his favoured pylon-forest ...”

“... in my uncertainty. Go down to the National Gallery for a meeting of the trustees, where Keith Thomas tells me that his polling booth in Oxford is next door to a pub in Merton Street and that, it being May morning, he had to fight his way in through crowds of drunken revellers, an ordeal he feels might deter tamer spirits. As a historian he speculates ...”

“... a Christian after all) but that of the rest of the cast. 7 April. The open mouth of Chelsea’s Frank Lampard, having scored a goal, is also the howl on the face of the damned man in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. 16 April. The row over Lord Ashcroft’s non-dom status seems to have died down. Nobody, I think, noted that it was the reverse of the row that ...”

“... even Hemingway’s white-boned prose acquired loose flaps. Two years later, still stricken with Thomas Wolfe elephantiasis, Styron sends haunted dispatches from the asphalt jungle. ‘New York is vast, hideous and strewn with the wrecks of lost and fidgeting souls.’ Unlike so many others of his word-besotted WWII-vet generation, he would retain this Old ...”

“... media as ‘the Congo Crisis’ – were funded by Belgian and American business interests. As Thomas Kanza explained a decade later in Conflict in the Congo (1972), the separatists ‘were dependent, ideologically and financially, on the mining companies. Their political motives were dictated by the Europeans who made common cause with them.’ The mining ...”

“... East Coast filmmakers hurried West to seek maximum sunlight and maximum separation from Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company, which demanded copyright payment or else a bullet in the expensive newfangled movie cameras. The canyons and ravines of the Hollywood Hills were the natural redoubts against the Patents Company ...”

“... was a home student at Somerville. In 1882, she got a first-class degree in English, the first of Thomas Arnold’s female grandchildren so to distinguish herself.At Oxford she met another offspring of a famous dynasty, T.H. Huxley’s son, Leonard. The young man had been a brilliant undergraduate. Should he marry, he would forfeit a career in law, politics ...”

“... Books of Jacob. I don’t think it’s coincidental that The Empusium, with its echoes of Thomas Mann and The Magic Mountain, came out as The Magic Mountain hit its centenary, an anniversary marked everywhere with articles about ‘Mann’s many prophetic ironies’ and ‘nuanced discussions’ and so on. No mention at all of the ‘painful ...”

“... by training and profession, a philosopher by vocation, and an economist in his spare time, Frank Ramsey was blessed with an extraordinarily acute intelligence and an extremely likeable nature. Unfortunately for all those who knew him and for the intellectual history of the 20th century, he was also cursed with a chronic liver condition. He died in 1930 ...”

“... compiled. The Poetry Book Society Anthology includes several tantalising extracts – from Frank Ormsby’s ‘The Sports Section’, for instance, and Ken Smith’s cycle about life in Wormwood Scrubs, ‘House of Green Ginger’. As though to remind us that the Return of the Sonnet is a creative, as well as Lit Crit, phenomenon, Tony Harrison and ...”

“... But for Trilling the mix seems exactly right. The famed grace and wit come across, but so does a frank recognition of the defences and swerves forced on metropolitan intellectuals by events. Trilling’s story is told by other New Yorkers, including Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe and Norman Podhoretz, who between them seem to muster a greater range of ...”

“... to happen, we might as well enjoy them when they do. (Basically, it’s the argument advanced by Thomas DeQuincey in ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’.) Football used to take a similar approach. When Frank Rijkaard spat at Rudi Völler in 1990, we were showed the flying lump of gob in slow motion from ...”