“... of the fight still on him. The truest literary account of Vietnam is generally taken to be Michael Herr’s Dispatches – a work whose title declares it to be a direct communication from the front. The hitherto most-applauded novel of Vietnam, John Del Vecchio’s The Thirteenth Valley (1982), was written by a former member of the 101st Airborne ...”

“... sky behind him, a painting long believed to be a portrait of Dr Johnson’s beloved black servant, Frank Barber. Houdon’s radiant patinated plaster head of a black woman of 1781, probably made in connection with a fountain group for an aristocrat’s garden, is another. Above all, there is the Portrait d’une Négresse exhibited at the Paris salon in 1800 ...”

“... romantic hero of his early novels, Andrews in The Man Within, Oliver Chant in Name of Action, and Michael Crane in Rumour at Nightfall. There is too much self-love, too little self-criticism in these early portraits of pleasant anguished young men built up from Greene’s own notion of himself as a young man romantically caught in the toils of love.’ The ...”

“... most ramified of all the novels, the one with the most varied aspects to explore, as was shown in Michael Holquist’s Dostoevsky and the Novel and by Richard Peace’s remarkable examination, in Dostoevsky: The Major Novels, of its catacomb of religious symbolism and clash of hidden dogmas. It is a quarry for quite separate lines and kinds of study, like a ...”

“... pure style aims to express the inexpressible. Commenting on Czerniawski’s sympathetic artistry, Michael Irwin has noted that while Milosz’s translations of Rozewicz appear ‘irreducible’, Czerniawski improves on them by his daring elisions and sharp intelligence. The result is a poetry of ‘absolute transparency’, and some Polish reviewers have ...”

“... Lee Harvey Oswald, who looked nothing like the potential presidential assassins played by Frank Sinatra (in Suddenly) or Laurence Harvey (in The Manchurian Candidate), slid ticketless into the Texas Theatre in Dallas, for a double bill that would otherwise have drifted beyond record: Cry of Battle, set in the Philippines, and War is Hell!, a Korean ...”

“... different ages is the theme of Orlando. Keynes’s preface to his published Essays in Biography is frank about its purpose, to establish ‘the solidarity and historical continuity of the High Intelligentsia of England, who have built up the foundations of our thought in the two and a half centuries since Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human ...”

“... was less convinced that Brando should be the lead. He considered a young Paul Newman and even Frank Sinatra. Did he reckon Marlon had a soft look, or too much beauty, for Terry Malloy, the failed boxer? Or had he heard that Marlon had been bad-mouthing him because Kazan (after tortured reflection) had in 1952 testified to the House Un-American Activities ...”

“... Surrealism). The afterlife of Surrealism is more active in poetry, as in the New York School of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and others: ‘We all “grew up Surrealist”,’ Ashbery once remarked, ‘without even being aware of it.’ Surrealist directives – to suspend rational control as much as possible, to let language dictate, to hold to the first ...”

“... perhaps the most widely read book on the subject, What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004), Thomas Frank argued that the upheavals of the 1960s generated fears and resentments that allowed issues such as abortion rights and racial equity to eclipse economics. Cowie’s book is both an ambitious history lesson and a contribution to this ongoing ...”

“... to understand the person’s features in motion over time. That hadn’t always been the case. Michael Wishart, the son of Freud’s lover Lorna Wishart, said that when Freud was young, you couldn’t blink while he was painting your thumb or he became ‘distressed’. The majority of Freud’s prints, made three and a half decades later, were part of a ...”

“... Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin, James Coburn, and in England – and in a different, English way – Michael Caine, seldom did anything else. It was also a manner which could not always be easily distinguished from simple idleness. For the first 25 years of Mitchum’s career, his performances were routinely mocked – most consistently by Mitchum himself ...”

“... by his preliminary sketches, some of them so rough and full of energy they’re reminiscent of Frank Auerbach, though none of this dash survives into the finished portraits. Occasionally funny, too, particularly a sketch of Two Lovers Startled by a Young Person, a child gazing at a snogging couple.22 March. Good example of journalistic spite last week ...”

“... keep surgeries and hospices busy in the future. The Environment Agency fed the relevant minister, Michael Meacher, the usual soft soap. The firms responsible for working mixed ash into conglomerates used to surface new roads declined to reveal the locations of their handiwork, the 12,000 tonnes of aggregate dropped on the landscape. Their spokesman, sweating ...”

“... nothing but the working over of what is remembered.”’ Ellmann also quotes Joyce’s remark to Frank Budgen: ‘Imagination is memory.’ Budgen, whom Joyce met in Zurich in 1918, records Joyce expressing his aim ‘to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my ...”