“... gods and spirits, worshippers burned, buried or immersed such votives – there was a chapel to St Thomas Becket on Old London Bridge. The lid of the box containing the Jamestown ampulla was inscribed with a capital ‘M’, which might have been the owner’s initial, or stood for ‘Mary’, akin to the apotropaic double-Vs, thought to stand for ‘Virgin of ...”

“... neither here nor there but I may as well admit that too. And then I read The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas, an anti-Freudian Holocaust novel. My parents had it. I remember the passage on the letter scene in Eugene Onegin. (The heroine performs Tatiana.) I also remember the horrifying passage on Babi Yar, where the heroine dies, and where in reality many of my ...”

“... and Nicholas Kurti, the engineer Theodore von Kármán, and the economists Nicholas Kaldor and Thomas Balogh. They were overwhelmingly Jewish or from a Jewish background. Almost all were non-observant, some converted to Christianity, but all were quite Jewish enough to be eligible for the gas chamber under the Nazis. Some were politically socialist or ...”

“... opinion that the judgment pertained strictly to abortion; but in a supporting opinion, Clarence Thomas suggested that the court ‘reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents’, including contraception, same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage. The Dobbs decision would have been unimaginable without Trump, who appointed three ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Merrill’s called The Bait. During a soliloquy ‘heads swivelled as “Arthur Miller and Dylan Thomas … stumbled out,”’ ‘passing judgment’, as Hammer puts it, ‘with their feet’. ‘I learned what Mr Miller, with uncanny insight, had whispered in Dylan’s ear shortly after the curtain rose,’ Merrill wrote years later in his memoir A ...”

“... with Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, and Roth met Kenneth Burke, Hart Crane, James T. Farrell and Thomas Wolfe at her salon on 61 Morton Street. She set out to make an intellectual of him in the manner of Henry Higgins, Kellman says, and he suspects that her mentoring of young Jewish men – Roth and Winter weren’t the only ones – was unconsciously aimed ...”

“... John Wiltshire’s. The first is an attractive and well-documented biography by Bertram Davis of Thomas Percy, editor of the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and a member of the Johnson circle*. The second† is a lively collection of essays by several hands, commemorating the bicentenary of the Life of Johnson, and covering various aspects of Boswell’s ...”

“... Christine Hayek said, ‘absolutely none.’Listen to Jonathan Rée discuss this piece with Thomas Jones on the LRB ...”

“... order of strength – before it kills everybody! Our tech overlords like the idea of being Thomas Edison, genius inventor-businessman, but they often have more in common with P.T. Barnum, genius of marketing and hype. Altman could go toe-to-toe with Barnum, and I wouldn’t want to pick a winner.In addition to being a superb marketing tool, Doomerism ...”