“... books about Mahler, has edited a new one, The Mahler Companion. Two other biographies, by Peter Franklin and Jonathan Carr, have recently appeared. And, of course, there are recordings – well over a thousand versions of twenty works. A Mahler Discography, published in 1995, is already thoroughly out of date. One starts to wonder: is there such a thing as ...”

“... so many members of the white working class have abandoned their loyalty to the Democratic Party of Franklin D. Roosevelt and decided to vote for candidates whose policies, including tax cuts for the rich, hostility to trade unions and an embrace of economic globalisation, undermine their own economic interests. In perhaps the most widely read book on the ...”

“... the full consciousness of the purity and lucidity of one’s motives (mine are worthy of Benjamin Franklin) one asks one’s self what one is doing in that galère.’ Michael Anesko’s strikingly authoritative ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship gives a good many detailed and ...”

“... to be funny. I suppose otherwise they’d never laugh at all. In their biography The Real Romney, Michael Kranish and Scott Helman write that ‘within the family, Romney’s zany side was well known.’* They give two examples: Romney assuming ‘the voices of cartoon characters’ in letters home from Bordeaux, where he was a missionary in the late ...”

“... that have been reiterated recently by public intellectuals such as Timothy Garton Ash, Michael Ignatieff and Leon Wieseltier. To hold his own against such adversaries, he suggests that he isn’t speaking solely for himself. Instead, he is giving recognition to the ‘millennial and post-millennial generations’ who find little in liberalism worth ...”

“... it into social democrats whom Washington can work with, and demagogues who must be contained. As Michael Reid, an editor at the Economist, puts it, it is ‘hard to overstate what is at stake in this ideological rivalry, this battle for Latin America’s soul’ between liberal democrats and a new generation of knights errant who have learned to manipulate ...”

“... the FBI as part of its routine background checks for important government nominees. The evangelist Franklin Graham and various Republicans claim that since Kavanaugh did not actually rape Ford, but merely assaulted and groped her, and then stopped, his honourable character is evident.Because of death threats, Dr Ford is forced to move her family into ...”

“... negotiating the competing national prerogatives of the Western allies and the substantial egos of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Field Marshal Montgomery and General Patton. Dad thought Eisenhower was a man with ballast, a leader. But the Finnegans wanted to argue Ike’s policies.Note the trace of red-baiting in the bit about the ...”

“... are often in the middle of the day and at lunchtime today it’s The Stars Look Down (1939) with Michael Redgrave, which I would have seen in 1940 in one of Armley’s half a dozen picture houses. Like How Green Was My Valley (1941) and Emlyn Williams’s The Corn Is Green (1945), it’s the story of a working-class boy bettering himself through education ...”

“... old Jewish community of Baghdad, moved to London as a young man, and came under the influence of Michael Oakeshott, then Britain’s best-known conservative political philosopher. On the moderate right was Anthony Smith, a British-born practising Orthodox Jew, who taught history in London throughout a long career. Convinced that the Jews were the most ...”

“... about the Lusitania for President Woodrow Wilson, and too easy about Pearl Harbour for President Franklin Roosevelt – both of these, incidentally, hypotheses which later Churchill historians are finding harder to dismiss – but such arguments had been subsumed in the long withdrawing roar of American isolationism. The events in Dealey Plaza and the Dallas ...”

“... and amateur naturalist Teddy Roosevelt, were unsparing in their derision. In 1917, Thayer wrote to Franklin Roosevelt urging that responsibility for the development of camouflage schemes should be put in the hands of artists because they alone could claim true expertise in ‘visibility’. By then, his ideas had been taken up by members of the newly formed ...”

“... of female sexual perversion is the overlay on a savage critique of normal male sexuality. In Michael Haneke’s film of the novel a cool symmetry prevails: no sides are taken. But the book leaves us in no doubt that what Klemmer does to Erika is of a different order of harm from what she does to him. Erika’s weapon is ‘not doing’, keeping the sex ...”

“... models; even the biggest developers and the most enormous projects now try, in the words of Michael Bloomberg’s administration, to ‘build like Moses with Jane Jacobs in mind’. Zipp and Storring write that we live in a ‘triumphant era of urban symphony’, where the things that once marked Jacobs out as subversive and eccentric – a love of ...”

“... containing comments about Jews from such authors as Ludwig Lewisohn, Hilaire Belloc and Benjamin Franklin, who is said to have wanted Jews, described as ‘Asiatics’, excluded from the United States by the Constitution. This last citation is spurious.Some commentators, including Geoffrey Hartman, say that by the standards of the time this was pretty ...”