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“... its European counterparts, with rare skill; compared to the recent The American Establishment by Leonard and Mark Silk, Steel’s portrait is far more effective precisely because, like Lippmann himself, Steel understands that what matters is how it is animated, what a master of its contradictions and conjunctures can ...”

“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... to shut a window or moderate the volume. One summer afternoon, when I was doggedly trying to mark a batch of A-level papers, my patience gave out, and I crossed the street in protest. Rereading this now, in the light of Carey’s book, I find myself wondering what he would make of such a tale if the complainer had been a drippy poet and the noisemakers ...”

“... him by his Bloomsbury acquaintances and chums, both old and young. ‘When I first saw Desmond,’ Leonard Woolf later recalled, ‘he looked like a superb young eagle who with one sweep of his great wing could soar to any height he chose ... Why did he never fulfil his promise? Why did the splendid eagle degenerate into an affable hawk?’ This was a question ...”

“... William Body, who complained about his lodgings was put very firmly in his place by Lord Leonard Grey: ‘I saide,’ Grey reported, ‘I was sure he sholde never be so good, as the Dukes of Norfoke, and Suffolke, and my lorde my brother [the Marquess of Dorset], whom I had seen lodged wors.’ Those in command exhibited many qualities. Grey was ...”

“... someone who had read it all before a dozen times? This train of speculation leads us closer to the mark. The official biography, and Churchill’s own works, are far too extensive for most people to read even if they could afford to buy them, which they cannot. So there is a huge and lucrative gap in the market for the middle-range biography. The point happens ...”

“... are.The Brewhouse is not a garret, quite; say sheltered accommodation rather. A granny flat. But mark this. If the college is minded to provide this accommodation it’s for nothing so vulgar as a poet in residence. This isn’t Keele, still less is it East Anglia. No. We see it as providing a niche – young persons nowadays might even call it a pad – for ...”

“... Revolution, and ‘if its sentences are still unfinished, it is up to us to finish them.’ Mark Steinberg is the only one of the professional historians writing on the revolution to confess to any lingering emotional attachment to it. Of course, revolutionary idealism and daring leaps into the unknown tend to result in hard landings, but, Steinberg ...”

“... some form of enlightenment. In Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (1991), Johnson’s fourth novel, Leonard English, a failed suicide, gives up his job as a medical equipment salesman in Kansas and moves to Provincetown, Massachusetts to become a private detective. He’s another drifter, a voyeuristic onlooker, who visits drag shows, develops a crush on a ...”

“... Rand Institute in California. The ARI was founded in 1985, three years after Rand’s death, by Leonard Peikoff, her friend and heir. It runs a newsletter called Impact and, via the Objectivist Academic Center, undergraduate courses in the Randian world vision. Objectivism was the name Rand gave to the system of philosophy she developed in a 30,000-word ...”

“... it was that the better writers – whom we may as well call James Kelman, Alasdair Gray and Tom Leonard among others – wouldn’t join in on the song. ‘It’s their loss,’ she said. ‘I mean, what do they want?’ A fairly good idea of what they wanted could be gleaned at that time from a visit to the Scotia Bar in Stockwell Street, where the ...”

“... of terror, of pain, and awakens that infinite yearning which is the essence of Romanticism.’Mark Evan Bonds describes this modern tendency to hear music as ‘sonic autobiography’ as the ‘Beethoven Syndrome’. Extending the project of an earlier work, Music as Thought (2006), Bonds shows in his acute new book how novel this emphasis was, and how ...”

“... Malcolm’s word) throughout the intellectual world. He was passionately determined to make his mark as a scientist, and it could be that the most effective way of persuading the world that he’d seen further than any of his rivals, especially those among them, like Adler and Jung, who’d been obliged to pack their bags and leave the Freudian house, was ...”

“... of the Horned Magdalene’ is a black comedy about furious turn-over in an old people’s home. Leonard Deane-King combines Science Fiction and fairy-tale in ‘Good Intentions’ – a story which will appeal to admirers of Spielberg’s E.T. – when Chaz and Len find a friendly Martian in the backyard. Mark Illis’s ...”

“... whiff here of the loftily musing Poet; there’s something a little stagey about that exclamation-mark, but such worries vanish with I do not like the big brave boasts of war.          GIVE ME GOOD PIGEONS! – A very large number of Great Commoners Built like Nye Bevan or Gambetta. Strong, rather than prettily melodious, clear and confident, this ...”