“... quixotic bill to prohibit first use of any nuclear weapon without a congressional declaration.) As Arthur Schlesinger pointed out forty years ago in The Imperial Presidency, Congress ‘almost came to love its impotence’ during the Cold War: ‘The image of the president acting by himself in foreign affairs, imposing his own sense of reality and necessity on ...”

“... Call’. ‘We all knew about the previous headmistress, Sister Mary Patricia, who had been young and pretty with a life of fun ahead of her – and The Call came to her like a thunderbolt. She couldn’t escape it. She went twice round the world to try to escape it, but to no avail. To me, that was a fate worse than death.’We learn that Ann Leslie ...”

“... tracking one down to the Colorado desert, where he was approached by a member of the crew, a young man of ‘Nordic’ appearance, wearing what appeared to be ski pants. He had soft, unblemished skin, long, flowing hair and sparkling white teeth. Communicating telepathically, he explained that his name was Orthon, that he came from Venus, and that he was ...”

“... before a pierglass; we might imagine these objects that once belonged to a beautiful, famous, sad, young woman, can tell us something strange and true about our own lives. The people who queued to see her things around the world were apt to say such a thing. The eternal-seeming fabulousness of a great movie star – like that of a princess – might serve for ...”

“... In retailer language, you can lower your mark-up but earn more because of the increased volume. Arthur Danto once observed that Andy Warhol had only one idea – roughly, that mass-produced media images could be seen as a form of art – but that what was unique about him was that he fully grasped that idea in every ...”

“... effects around the heath. One photograph shows its wildest corner framing the concrete grid of Arthur Rubinstein’s low-rise block of flats on Vanbrugh Park: an almost 18th-century image of nature and geometrical rigour. The Dulwich work uses landscape in a much more controlled way, with fewer ‘English’ effects, as in the tall evergreen trees and ...”

“... in watching television, would have known why. Seated behind him was a thick-set shaven-headed young man in dark glasses, black suit and black T-shirt who, minus the shades and occasionally (and far too rarely some viewers felt) minus the T-shirt, appeared nightly on the nation’s screens in a television soap. The previous week he had stunned his audience ...”

“... directing our attention unswervingly to what is specific and different about this moment.’ As a young socialist organiser in Turin, Gramsci had enthusiastically supported the Bolshevik Revolution. After 1926, imprisoned by the fascists, he turned his attention to figuring out why the revolutions that almost happened across Europe in the 1910s and 1920s had ...”

“... Here is a typically excruciating recollection:His aunt came home from her business with a pretty young lady friend who stooped and kissed the cunning child,So that when she went to the bathroom during the evening, he went to the hallway and saw her shadow on the glazed window door,And the untaught Id banged and banged on the door, demanded admission, wished ...”

“... fired.) ‘In my whole life,’ he confided to Einstein, ‘I have never felt so Jewish as now.’ Young Fritz, too, came to feel for the first time that he was not ‘Aryan’, a word that had had little resonance before. He knew nothing of his Jewish origins until his father’s severe lecture after he directed an anti-semitic remark at his sister. Then the ...”

“... and is attentive to Smith’s range of allusion – Homer, Pindar, Seneca, Catullus, Wither, Young, Blake, Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, Eliot and many more. May’s interest in Smith’s performances makes you want to return to her recordings, gets you to think about the kind of life her voice could bring to the poems, and prompts you to ...”

“... you off their books. I came across another example of the broken containment field in the work of Arthur Upfield, who wrote a series of novels in the 1930s and onwards featuring an indigenous Australian detective, Bony, short for Napoleon Bonaparte. Upfield’s masterpiece, The Sands of Windee, is a well-realised and vivid book, and teaches you a lot about ...”

“... last someone has dared to speak out …’ Some of Powell’s lifelong opponents, including the young Devon MP Michael Heseltine, conceded that their constituents, even in rural areas which had scarcely seen a black face, were right behind Enoch. If the present system of election to the Tory leadership had been in operation, he would have swept home in any ...”

“... coming. Auden based a character in The Age of Anxiety, published in 1947, on Schuyler: Emble is a young man given to watching others with ‘a covert but passionate curiosity. What makes them tick? What would it feel like to be a success?’ Just over forty years later, Schuyler had an inkling. Having been introduced to the audience at the Dia Art Foundation ...”

“... to intimidate the heterosexual reader. Whereas most other gay novelists concentrated on the young and solitary protagonist, afraid to avow his forbidden desires, or on the gay couple (sensitive, noble, tormented), living in a forest or by the sea or in any event in romantic isolation (the alibi of love), Genet was picturing the gaudy homosexual ghetto ...”