“... from the top down. A ‘tiny élite’ created the nation, and Johnson offers no sense of what Bernard Bailyn calls the ‘contagion of liberty’ – the way small farmers, urban labourers and even slaves seized on the patriotic ideology to advance their own claims. Johnson’s account of the late 19th century offers an excellent description of ...”

“... punctuated by the incessant drip-drop of tiny signifying moments’. Some of these he recorded: MARTIN: Well, you gel orders to burn a village, and a gook tries to put the fire out while you’re trying to burn his hootch. He fucks with you, and you show him that you can fuck with him. You can push him away, or you can kick his ass, or you can do what we ...”

“... misuse history to advance their dangerous ideologies, and, at the other end of the scale, men like Martin Gray (For those I loved), who use these appalling events for self-aggrandisement. Interestingly, nobody minds much about Irving, but attacking Gray causes wrathful indignation among Holocaust dogmatists. I sought to learn from men who became monsters, such ...”

“... left – began with the banning of Mars Bars.In the 1980s liking football was, at best, uncool. Martin Amis described the average football fan as having ‘the body and complexion of a cheese and onion crisp’. At its worst it was criminal: Heysel, Hillsborough, Bradford. It was also quite predictable. During Thatcher’s time in office, Liverpool won the ...”

“... but none of them should play any part in moral philosophy’s critical thought about principles. Bernard Williams, on the other hand, has queried whether theory has any authority to override our intuitive convictions. Many other philosophers are uncomfortable with both of these positions. The dismissal of intuitions seems to open up the danger of a ...”

“... in the amiably long-suffering Russian peasants he drew on a trip to the Soviet Union with Kingsley Martin, who supplied an incongruously starry-eyed commentary; even in his Hitler, whom he invariably belittled by ridicule rather than direct attack: ‘Fuehrer to be kept in bullet-proof bottle.’ Some of Low’s wartime cartoons are solemn. It is rare for him ...”

“... in New York; but on the question of their authorship there is now wide agreement, although Bernard Berenson, for example, took a very different view from the one now accepted.* At stake is not just the status of the drawings themselves, but also the wider question of exactly what contribution Michelangelo made to Sebastiano’s paintings. The drawings ...”

“... fluency. It’s this evenness of texture that is the basis for the charge that he writes too well. Martin Amis has described the effects created by Updike’s prose as being like cinematography – ‘rich, ravishing, and suspiciously frictionless’. The most memorable piece of Prac Crit performed on Updike comes from Mailer’s novel Tough guys don’t ...”

“... particular, or it is a depiction of Chastity. All in all, it may be best to follow the example of Martin Kemp, whose 1981 study of the artist laconically captioned the painting Portrait of a Lady on a Balcony – though even this will not satisfy those denizens of the Mona Lisa websites and news groups who believe that she is really a man, and perhaps even ...”

“... passes over. A specifically Jewish vein of it, stretching from Ernst Bloch and Gustav Landauer to Martin Buber and Herman Cohen, has recently been excavated by Russell Jacoby in Picture Imperfect.* Curiously, neither Jacoby nor Jameson mentions the latest Jewish thinker to inherit this tradition, Jacques Derrida. Theodor Adorno, whom Jameson does discuss, is ...”

“... and curating. But there is also the allure of their bleak vision. Joy Division’s guitarist, Bernard Sumner, recalls teenage years blighted by the simpering commerciality of the pop charts: he told me recently, with a wince, that one of the reasons he’d wanted to form a band was hearing the song ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’. Not enough attention has ...”

“... little credibility amongst scholars, and which was authoritatively disposed of in a major essay by Martin Broszat, one of many current historians whom Dawidowicz implicitly belittles.In all these ways the discussion of the literature is selective, impressionistic and extremely unreliable. It encourages little confidence in the author’s judgment. She descends ...”

“... Poet’.Don Juan is a difficult poem to see past. McGann’s starting point is a belief, shared by Bernard Beatty in his essay collection Reading Byron, that the ‘poetic character’ of large swathes of Byron’s work – the non-comic material, much of it produced before his turn to the ottava rima stanza in 1817 – has been ‘obscured by Don Juan’s ...”

“... knew them. Athanasius’ Life of the Egyptian hermit Antony and Sulpicius Severus’ biography of Martin of Tours, both from the fourth century, became models of the genre. Several medieval saints, among them Francis, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Becket and Catherine of Siena, have Lives that are both richly textured and ...”

“... bought, my first dealer had started to represent me. I was due to have a solo exhibition at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery the year after I met William Feaver.Here is his description of me on first sight:We went off to dinner. I drove. He, in his immaculate grey flannel suit, twitched beside me all the way, giving directions to Mark’s Club, off Berkeley ...”