“... season is the Armani retrospective 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 ...”

“... wave of the ‘sexual revolution’, following in the wake of a shoal of similar books, including David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, a highly dubious publication that claimed anything other than the ‘penis-vagina version of sex’ was a perversion, and Nena and George O’Neill’s Open Marriage: A New ...”

“... disparaged the culture of gift-giving on which that influence seemed to rely. The diplomat David Urquhart’s neurosis about Russian influence at Constantinople derived from his failure to persuade Ottoman officials to accept his proposals for a free-trade treaty; his Eurocentric perspective led him to smell a Russian plot. Britain used its naval power ...”

“... probably the most important book yet to appear in the dissident-Communist perspective. Fortunately David Fernbach’s translation makes it accessible (apart from a few Volapük lapses like ‘genial’ for génial) and copes ruggedly with the steeper philosophical faces. The perspective itself is questionable, however. Without objecting for a moment to the ...”

“... United States in the year following its publication – even such serious-minded critics as Edmund Wilson and the young Lionel Trilling regularly disparaged her as spinsterish, middlebrow and reactionary: a kind of tiresome maiden aunt in the back parlour of American letters. True, Cather had her defenders – but as Acocella grimly notes, they were prone to ...”

“... that she be given a non-custodial sentence, so it came as a shock when, on 5 March 2018, Sheriff David Pender jailed her for sixteen months.Katie’s childhood had been as stable as William’s was volatile. She and her younger brother grew up in a semi-detached house on the southern edge of Glasgow, with their parents, Stuart, a data analyst, and Linda, a ...”

“... fifth volume of the Pilgrim letters and Nina Burgis’s introduction to the Clarendon edition of David Copperfield.) But it seems that Dickens first confided the material to Forster in 1847. Forster, of course, had already lined himself up as the great inimitable’s Boswell. There was the tantalising promise that Dickens might write more – a whole ...”

“... he does not flinch from analysing those who reached the top – MacDonald, Attlee, Gaitskell, Wilson. But he has just as much to say about those dedicated but less well-known people who did so much to build up the Labour Party’s machine: Henderson, Morrison, Dalton and Rita Hinden. And in the figure of Morgan Phillips this third major strength of the ...”

“... one of the cruces of a growing body of biographical studies. In his stylish Life of 1990, A.N. Wilson declared: ‘That he fell in love with Mrs Moore, and she with him … cannot be in doubt,’ adding: ‘While nothing will ever be proved on either side, the burden of proof is on those who believe that Lewis and Mrs Moore were not lovers – probably ...”

“... jokes and puns, and farcical escapism: Rushdie, Grass, Pynchon in his most recent novel, David Foster Wallace, even Zadie Smith. In novels by those writers, we have lately encountered terrorist groups with silly names, a genetically engineered mouse, two clocks having a conversation with each other, a giant cheese, a baby who plays air guitar in his ...”

“... engage in a colloquy at a crucial moment of modern history – people like the educationalist David Hare, the Anglo-Portuguese poet and teacher Henry Derozio, the great Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. If Kipling had been born fifty years earlier, it would have been impossible for him to write the cheerfully assonantal but bleak lines: ‘O East is ...”

“... fake jocular, know-your-place remarks of the sort made by Michael Fallon to Andrea Leadsom, or by David Davis of Diane Abbott. In the 1979 general election, which brought the Conservatives to power under Margaret Thatcher – something Harman describes as an ‘excruciating blow’ – 19 women were elected, the lowest postwar figure aside from the 17 elected ...”

“... house. Within hours of her murder Tony Blair spoke of it as ‘a disgusting act of barbarity’. David Andrews, the Irish Foreign Minister, said that it was ‘clearly designed to sabotage the peace process at this very critical time’. A crowd of about two hundred young people marched on the RUC station at Lurgan. A few of them threw petrol bombs at ...”

“... of Roger Ackroyd. Or as Derek Raymond (Robin Cook) frequently proclaimed, paraphrasing Edmund Wilson: ‘who gives a fuck who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Raymond, attempting in The Hidden Files to define the ‘black novel’ in which he specialised, glossed the Jamesian school as ‘pretentious escapist crap for the well-heeled middle-class market’. A ...”

“... glorifying the work of the Velvet Underground over Motown releases, the production skills of Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and ...”