“... exposed his thin skin. For him, Manhattan has always been the opposite of what home was for Robert Frost, ‘the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’ Wa-a-a-a-h!Winning the presidency was never a deep desire, more a branding scheme that spun out of control, but Trump has tried to turn his victory into a means to compel ...”

“... crucial analytic concept after her: the Female Ovation Complex, perhaps. And indeed, why not? As Robert Gottlieb’s concise yet stylish new biography reminds us, the great actress’s sumptuously chequered life would have presented even the most dimwitted Viennese shrink with a veritable orchestra pit of things to quiz her about. Consider, Herr Doktor, some ...”

“... Morris scholar John Drinkwater, as though to oppose it would be derisive of the common mood. Robert Byron, less precious than usual, regretted that ‘according to official and ecclesiastical standards … a bit of the old Roman wall is of more importance than Nash’s Regent Street, and one ruined pointed arch than all Wren’s churches put ...”

“... a contingency plan for withdrawal from Indo-China. He became the house intellectual on the Oliver Stone movie JFK, and his work was much cried up by the Schlesinger school of apologetics. Kennedy might have started the Vietnam War, covertly committed men and resources to the war, argued forcefully for the symbolic importance of the war – but would have ...”

“... of many waters’. In his remarkable new translation of the Pentateuch, a monument of scholarship, Robert Alter eschews ‘face’ to describe the surface of the world at the start of Genesis, and I miss the cosmic implications, but his first two verses amply compensate with their own originality: ‘When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth ...”

“... of The Magic Flute (all of this under the auspices of the American director Peter Sellars). Robert Lowell meant to write a libretto and duly boned up with intensive attendance at the New York Met, but never delivered. John Ashbery has not, so far as I know, produced a libretto – only the poem, ‘Syringa’, specially composed for a setting by Elliott ...”

“... and he proceeds to draw a distinction between letters written with ink or ‘in tables of stone’ and those letters written ‘with the Spirit of the living God ... in fleshy tables of the heart’. This is an antinomian, born-again attitude which dedicates itself to ‘the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter ...”

“... the cinema-owners; the idiocy involved in cutting films down, etc.’ An essay from 1976 praising Robert Altman’s Nashville begins with two and a half pages of honest rage at the philistine state of German film criticism, which has dwindled to the status of the listings guide. ‘As this sort of criticism writes about films only as something that you ...”

“... 1915). And he may be the only 20th-century reader of The Biography of Elder Brown Warren Stone written by himself, with Additions and Reflections by Elder John Rogers (Cincinnati, 1847). He describes the way you could make out the shape of his uncle’s toes through the leather of his shoes. He evokes the prosperous farming community of Lincoln ...”

“... to dazzle the eyes and divert the imagination of the vulgar – Here a wooden lion, there a stone statue; in one place, a range of things like coffee-house boxes, covered a-top; in another, a parcel of ale-house benches; in a third, a puppet-shew representation of a tin cascade; in a fourth, a gloomy cave of a circular form, like a sepulchral vault half ...”

“... of a Mrs Bennet or an Emma, Sophia Ainger the vicar’s wife does her best to manoeuvre Rupert Stone-bird into the arms of sister Penelope. Her expedients include a dinner party at the vicarage, the Christmas bazaar, an excursion to Rome after Easter for the parish stalwarts. Stonebird proves as impervious as his name, or rather begins to develop instead a ...”

“... lastyear of the great forerunner’s life. Stieglitz’s face has a weary look not unlike that of Robert Flaherty, father of the documentary film, another great forerunner whose portrait Cartier-Bresson took in the same year. A similar weariness infuses the faces of Georges Rouault and Pierre Bonnard in their 1944 portraits; but the relationship between these ...”

“... in evolution about which opinion was divided but not generally hostile. It was 15 years since Robert Chambers had caused a sensation with the anonymous publication of his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Prince Albert read it aloud to Queen Victoria, and in his novel Tancred, where it features as The Revelations of Chaos, Disraeli parodied ...”

“... went on to be Trump’s national security adviser – had made indiscreet comments to a Rolling Stone reporter about the inadequacies of Joe Biden, Richard Holbrooke and Obama himself. Despite Flynn’s later contempt for Hillary Clinton – he led the chants of ‘lock her up’ at the Republican National Convention – she was well liked by ...”

“... at the bottom of the river while the scene unfolding on the bank slowly enters the wood and stone of the bridge above her and passes into her body: ‘Her face, pressed sideways to the piling, absorbs it all.’ In the first story in Specimen Days, ‘In the Machine’, set at the height of New York’s industrial revolution, a young boy called Lucas ...”