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“... 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 ...”

“... has an immense, obliterating power. One only has to look at the States and the way Jesse Jackson has picked up and hepped up the old Martin Luther King rhetoric to see the power of militant language. Jackson may be a self-advertising photo-opportunist, but he has the magic words, the political jive-talk, the ...”

“... would be Newt Gingrich of Georgia. Sounded like a redneck to me, and a wondrous name withal. (Mark Stamaty, best of Washington cartoonists, took to calling him ‘Congressman Hoot Salamander’.) I didn’t do much prep. As usual, the proceedings opened with the charge that I was ignorant of the lessons of Munich. Generally, the other side didn’t know ...”

“... his tendency to bluntness. His criticisms of Kenyatta’s development plans were often on the mark. He anticipated the catastrophes created by unregulated capital and proposed instead the melding of free market and communalism in land co-operatives. But accurate criticism was not the path to power. Barack found he could not play the fool to curry favour ...”

“... have a life of its own, the greater the distortion of form which takes place. A brush stroke is a mark; it is also the action which makes the mark. The marks are the painting – its physical substance. The sequence of actions is its history. This curious feature of painting – that it is capable of carrying the history of ...”

“... react with that special kind of relief reserved for moments of illumination, when an exclamation mark replaces a question mark: eureka! Each step in a geometric proof, each generalisation that connects singulars unexpectedly into a class detonates its own miniature surprise. According to Fisher, the reader who has followed ...”

“... the international Communist conspiracy. It could be argued, against Rogin, that these three phases mark quite distinct institutional and psychological structures in American experience, just as a more optimistic account of the history of the United States would insist upon a counter-tradition of democratic openness and tolerance. But in a series of powerful ...”

“... The Prophecy pictures were made in tragic circumstances. By 1956 Krasner’s marriage to Jackson Pollock was all but broken. In August that year, while Krasner was in Europe, Pollock’s Oldsmobile came off the road at speed, killing himself and Edith Metzger, a friend of his lover, Ruth Kligman. Kligman survived the crash. The paintings Krasner made ...”

“... Martin Luther King Jr and Coca-Cola. Seen through Rutheiser’s ironic, cold eye these nodes mark the fault lines of a disintegrative urban history. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, the most popular movie and, after the Bible, the best-selling book of all time, is a monument to white supremacy. The book and film offer different variations on the ...”

“... 1942, he did not ‘believe you have to be a standout from your fellow men in order to make your mark in the world. Average will do it.’ A plain speaker from the heartland who would avoid being corrupted by Hollywood, and later by Sacramento and Washington: this was the core of the Reagan legend.Throughout his career, Reagan spent much of his mental life ...”

“... Tom Courtenay and Joanna Lumley – and was ‘bought’ in 1998 by the then BBC2 controller Mark Thompson for broadcast at Christmas. Andrew Davies symbolised the great success of 1990s BBC drama: the reinvention of the classic serial, whose high points (including Davies’s Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch) were produced under the wing of Michael ...”

“... On 25 January 1788, HMS Supply eased her way between the imposing sandstone cliffs that mark the entrance to Port Jackson and into a waterway that John White, the First Fleet’s surgeon, proclaimed as ‘the finest and most extensive harbour in the universe’. The hyperbole was perhaps understandable, for the Britons were seeing Sydney Harbour through eyes wearied by months at sea, and this was to be their new home ...”

“... to a deep admiration for handicraft (though never his own), conceived a ceramic Michael Jackson and chimp Bubbles and hired expert Italian artisans to fabricate it; the result is a centrepiece of the Broad Collection. He could never have executed such work himself; but it was his idea. Was Disney such an artist? Well, he wasn’t exactly like any of ...”

“... is a moment of suspended quotation which would have delighted both Dickens and his modern analyser Mark Lambert:     ‘Adulterer,’ Ralph said calmly, ‘and murderer’.     Sutherland said just as calmly, ‘Piss off or I’ll bust you wide open.’ Just as calmly, but not just as poisedly. Dignity’s preposterousness meets indignity’s ...”