“... since before the First World War. The epithet ‘triumphant’ in the title of the new volume of John Richardson’s magnum opus has a brash, swaggering ring: fittingly so. This is the tale of an extremely rich and famous man who came pretty near to doing whatever he wanted. The Picasso of the 1920s was physically strong and socially supple: he could charm ...”

“... even from the bench), but, dissatisfied even with the enormous hall and galleries added by John of Gaunt in the 14th century, he then built what was in effect a whole new Tudor palace within the medieval walls. This entire section of the castle, together with a state-of-the-art garden installed at a speed which would do credit to any television ...”

“... reviews for a Selected Poems, published in the same year, which was one of the first titles in John Lehmann’s ‘New Hogarth Library’ series. The exceptional circumstances of the war not only contributed to Day-Lewis’s literary success; they provided the enabling conditions for his most significant love affair. The novelist Rosamond Lehmann reviewed ...”

“... conservatives.In the swing state of Pennsylvania (the fifth most populous in the country), John Fetterman, a left-leaning Democrat and a strong supporter of marijuana legalisation and criminal justice reform, defeated a Trump-backed candidate, Mehmet Oz, by 4.6 percentage points, outperforming Biden’s result in the state in 2020; the Democratic ...”

“... control their own fate: ‘We are out for life and all that life can give us,’ the revolutionary John Maclean said at his trial for sedition in 1918. George Square, 31 January 1919 My grandparents met at a Glasgow ILP branch sometime around the end of the First World War, and I’ve always had a rather romantic view of the party and of that ...”

“... inconsistency unperceived by the speaker’. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Ricks quotes Sir John Mahaffy’s answer, when asked to distinguish the Irish bull from similar freaks of language: ‘The Irish bull is always pregnant.’ More often than the OED appreciates, the Irish bull knows he’s pregnant and is offering his audience an occasion to ...”

“... aspect of sex. The process culminated in Havelock Ellis and Freud in the 19th century, and in Masters and Johnson and their imitators in the 20th. Foucault was a philosopher who knew little history, so he read scientific texts and paid scant attention to the enormous weight of evidence supporting the theory that a suffocating blanket of prudery had for ...”

“... and profits by what has been done in a variety of schools and by a number of very different masters. He describes his own procedure as ‘trying to make not so much “high” as rich and flexible art out of traditional and vernacular materials.’ He is also, no doubt, describing his own style when he writes that ‘the central and best tendency of ...”

“... to the standard of Einstein or Jeffrey Archer in this galaxy alone. So where are they all? When John Logie Baird invented television, he also invented a microwave messaging system broadcast through interstellar space. For forty years, programmes like I Love Lucy and Rawhide and Dynasty have been spearheading planet Earth’s attempt to get in ...”

“... by his translation of the Austrian folk tale Bambi, which carried a moist Foreword from John Galsworthy.) This was the literary bridge that carried Chambers from relative hackdom on the Daily Worker to pre-eminence at the Stalinist flagship of letters, The New Masses. Indeed it was his usefulness and ability in this department that got him ...”

“... hours of walking round, revolved round one aspect of my reading – Rider Haggard, Coral Island, John Buchan, G.A. Henty, Captain Marryat, and Lancelyn Green’s version of Malory. In my fantasies I was either a chivalric knight riding in quest of adventure, or a young boy journeying in foreign parts: both these characters obeyed an ethos which, quite ...”

“... commanding and melancholy elevation whose cadence is that of the great Romantic and post-Romantic masters of English heroic metre. The idiom of ‘Autumn. A Fragment’ is part Keatsian ode, part Yeatsian high informality, finely and appropriately blended. ‘Demons’ is, perhaps less successfully, rendered in a style of Gothic balladry, mingling spooky ...”

“... world’. Berenson’s recorded utterances sound all too self-consciously sagacious. ‘Young John Carter Brown, who one day was to become director of the National Gallery of Art’, came with a plan ‘to prepare for a museum career by first taking a business course’. Berenson urged him to ‘look, look, look, until you are blind with looking, and out ...”

“... resistant when it comes to abandoning myths. To cite a parallel example, my friend and colleague, John Chilton, has proved conclusively that although the great Blues singer Bessie Smith died following a car accident, it was not because she was refused treatment by a white Southern hospital – a version that is still widely and emotionally cited. I have ...”

“... already naked, prune-like eyes staring and an undraped bed right next to him. In 1946 the old masters of the camera, on the other hand, were wearing wrinkled shirt-sleeves without neckwear, the skinny Stieglitz lolling and polishing his glasses, a white lock falling over his brow, his glittering gaze fixed beyond us; the plump Flaherty with his hands on ...”