“... James Schuyler and Barbara Guest – becoming part of a social circle that was soon dominated by painters. In 1951 and again from 1955 until his death, O’Hara worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where he became a curator of exhibitions and a well known figure in the New York art world. In 1959 he embarked on a tumultuous love affair with Vincent ...”

“... OED, as coming from Paradoxe sur le comédien, Diderot’s account of why the greatest actor must be a person of zero sensibility, ‘un spectateur froid et tranquille’ of human nature. The phrase seems untranslatable because it belongs so clearly to its milieu: we imagine the Philosophes in their salons, not afraid of any ideas, valuing only each other’s ...”

“... Nearly everything he wrote is interesting for its sheer audacity, its freedom (even its freedom to be verbose) and its generosity of spirit.There is one obvious exception, which I’d like to describe here. I’m prompted to do so by two fascinating, if dispiriting discussions of his visit to Egypt in early 1967 that ...”

“... around the time that philosophers began reading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations side by side with Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Since then, more and more analytic philosophers have come to agree with Putnam that ‘part of the problem with present-day philosophy is a scientism inherited from the 19th century.’ Putnam urges us to ...”

“... mid-1960s, before it became part of the Health and Safety Executive: a philosophy graduate could be as successful as a chartered engineer. Indeed, diversity was one of its main strengths: the combination of a small group of specialists and a larger group with a wide variety of backgrounds gave it the ability to see a problem from many different perspectives ...”

“... over in academia Prince is still the party tape of choice. Publishing ‘like it’s 1999’ may be variously interpreted, but whatever the resulting book is called, the assumption is the same: the end of the millennium is inextricably linked with apocalypse, the end of the world, and the messianic fanatics who seek to bring it about. And so although these ...”

“... grainy photograph shows the doorway of a house, the double door itself scarcely visible, obscured by a row of three huge paintings, all four to five feet in height, which have been carefully posed on the doorstep. Each boasts an almost illegible array of shaded polygons. On top of the central painting a fourth is stacked, and flanking that, two more, both ...”

“... biggest draws in New York this 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 ...”

“... the life of someone they are liable to end up disliking intensely. Lawrence Thompson was selected by Robert Frost to be his official biographer: after literally living with his subject, the biographer found the poet to be very far from admirable; and the work he produced bore clear ...”

“... people. Nearly five million still live in some part of what was once Mandate Palestine, and can be divided into four distinct groups. More than a million have been citizens of Israel since 1948. Over 3.5 million, in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, are in their 38th year of military occupation, hermetically sealed off from one another. Each of ...”

“... Frankish Annals, the main Frankish narrative for the period, which were written up in 790 or so. By the time those annals had been put into print at Cologne in 1521, Charlemagne had come to be venerated as a saint, and also, with more historical justification, celebrated as the founder of both France and Germany. The ...”

“... Mary fell out rather badly. ‘The ill-will of Mary,’ it was reported, ‘so enraged Elizabeth, by nature the more choleric, that right in the middle of one finale she hurled herself at her enemy, pulled her by the hair, boxed her ears, bit her, punched her in the face, and almost broke her legs ...”

“... at being left behind ‘while the world hums at a great distance’, the pull was dwarfed by the push: the need to get out of whatever it was. In 1931, when she had already dropped out of Bryn Mawr, resigned from the Albany Times Union, and seduced and momentarily abandoned her first married man, she wrote to another disconsolate suitor: ‘This urge ...”

“... to interpret her motto in this way, Jones was also it seems a slippery character, ‘much hated’ by his colleagues, ‘spiteful, jealous and querulous … a fiery little man, with a staccato, military manner’, according to the historian of psychoanalysis Paul Roazen. He spent his life championing Freud, but even Freud described him as ‘a disagreeable ...”

“... of Artists International, International Brigaders, Trotskyites, Communists, pacifists failed by their tribunals. The playwright David Hare declared recently that working-class conscripts now met ‘the officer class’ for the first time and rebelled; but plenty had met the people issuing orders, at least since ...”