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“... investigative journalism, and Ms Moorehead has had to cover a lot of ground with speed. Sir Robert Mark has praised Fortune’s Hostages as a useful handbook: ‘required reading,’ he says, ‘in the unlikely and unhappy event that kidnapping here increased dramatically.’ In the meantime, it is interesting to discover, for example, the scale on which the ...”

“... press corps dutifully reported the official Pentagon version of events. A US navy captain called Mark Hill, who was working on a project for McNamara, eventually let Hersh in on the real, catastrophic story. (Hill was one of the honourable soldiers on whom Hersh came to rely.) ‘I remember being angry, of course, but also more than a bit ...”

“... Is there anything stranger than a pop star out of time? Before Elvis Presley, before Michael Jackson, there was Al Jolson – ‘the most popular entertainer of the first half of the 20th century,’ as Michael Rogin describes him. Eyes wide and mouth agape, arms outstretched and face painted black, Jolson concludes his performance in The Jazz Singer (1927) down on one knee, serenading the delighted actress who plays his mother in a voice as strong and piercing as a foghorn ...”

“... of his pack’, organising ballgames and Fourth of July pageants. A mediocre student, he made his mark in baseball and managed to gain admission to Harvard, along with a sprinkling of other Catholics. Making his way on personal magnetism, ‘he could charm a bird out of a tree’, a friend recalled. For years he had been attracted to Rose ...”

“... light brown hair into a series of upsweeps’, as she scrutinises ‘the small worry lines’ that mark ‘her otherwise smooth porcelain skin’. We watch her ‘walking carefully down the stairs in a pair of high-heeled shoes’. We’re told that she chose her dress carefully, opting for something simple, in the knowledge that soon ‘she would be among the ...”

“... from the Democrats. In the 1970s it was followers of the Democrat senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson who were loudest in their denunciation of the defeatist betrayal they perceived in the Nixon-Kissinger commitment to détente. But the contrast between the virile Reagan and doveish Carter in the election of 1980 pushed these Democrat hawks – the ...”

“... was only a partial truth. ‘Today seems to be a good day to remind everyone,’ tweeted Dominique Jackson, a (Democratic) Colorado state representative, ‘that the electrical grid in Texas was deregulated, privatised, and then removed from interconnected networks to avoid federal regulation or renewable energy options and to increase profits to a small ...”

“... bitterness and boatloads of swagger. A special operative can find himself being played by Mark Wahlberg in a big budget movie, as Marcus Luttrell did in the 2013 adaptation of his memoir, Lone Survivor, so secret military actions aren’t something you want to keep quiet about. As one serving SEAL told the Washington Post in 2011, neatly ...”

“... points to one of the key sources for that kind of anguished energy which is so often a distinctive mark of American writing. Chapter One draws on Washington Irving and on less well-known figures such as Timothy Flint and James Hall, and, taking up the fairly familiar point that when confronted by any new scene or phenomenon we need ‘reassuring frames’ or ...”

“... Stonewall Jackson, the deeply neurotic but irresistibly romantic, swashbuckling Confederate commander, thought that the great and swift destruction of life and property seen in the American Civil War was the essence of war generally. But this war was not swift. It was long and gruelling: 425 men, on average, died every day for 1458 days ...”

“... shaped by the preoccupations of the time; no doubt Susan Howe’s declaration in The Birth-mark (1993) that Dickinson’s ‘manuscripts should be understood as visual productions’ will at some point in the future seem as wholly of its time as Todd and Bingham’s blithe imposition of titles and removal of dashes. The Gorgeous Nothings is evidence of ...”

“... as a teenager, assaulted on a bed, she claims, at the hands of a drunken Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge. However, the human drama of Ford’s story, her treatment by the Senate Judiciary Committee and Kavanaugh’s bizarre counter-testimony are set inside a bigger picture: the concerted attempt over several decades by the Federalist Society, an ...”

“... since retired. Links remain, however. The junior officers of 1990 run the army of 2022. General Mark Carleton-Smith, the current chief of the general staff, passed out of Sandhurst in 1986. Sales’s assessment is revealing of a culture that requires rigidity in order to function amid the terror, fatigue and confusion of war, but as a consequence often ...”

“... weightier book for the sake of its weightier texts, or one of them. Varnedoe’s essay, ‘Comet: Jackson Pollock’s Life and Work’, is a splendidly intelligent, informative, well-organised and readable introduction to the subject. What I like so much about Varnedoe’s writing is the enjoyment, the relish, he palpably has in producing it, in all its ...”

“... by 24 painters, not all of them American but all of whom worked in the United States between 1930 (Jackson Pollock’s haunted self-portrait) and 1979 (Joan Mitchell’s joyful Salut Tom, which pulsates with fluid light). One might suppose that the very term ‘abstract expressionism’ – it was coined in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates writing in the ...”