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“... an interview with Karl Miller). There is an interesting account of the reception of North in R.F. Foster’s new study, a compact but comprehensive guide to Heaney. Foster is well attuned to the shifting contexts, as one would expect of a leading historian of modern Ireland, but he is also an extremely astute reader, and ...”

“... and they do keep cropping up. I think there’s more than a little Pynchon floating around John Kennedy Toole, whose A Confederacy of Dunces is a book nearly as bloated as its protagonist; Don DeLillo’s social, um, satires owe more than a little to Pynchon’s work; and in a recent essay in Harper’s magazine the young novelist Jonathan Franzen ...”

“... Museum of Modern Art in New York has had a string of such figures, from William Rubin to John Elderfield to Leah Dickerman). Today the more telling split is between modern and contemporary fields (the latter has no exact birthdate – 1970, 1980, 1989), but this is a schism less between the university and the museum than between scholarly curators ...”

“... on election night. But at least when Chicago Mayor Richard Daley helped to deliver Illinois to John Kennedy in the narrow contest of 1960, it was not televised. (For those keeping track of our dynastic democracy, Richard was father to William, the Gore campaign head, and to Richard II, the current Chicago Mayor.) One pants-down scene was captured live on ...”

“... than he seems to have been. Second, his analysis of word frequencies, a technique that Donald Foster used in order to finger Joe Klein as the author of Primary Colors: he was proved right when Klein (eventually) owned up, as James isn’t in a position to do; and Foster changed his mind about another of his celebrated ...”

“... the museum after its redesign by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi. In the New Yorker John Updike likened its presence to ‘an invisible cathedral’, but it is closer to an abstract palace. The main access is now nearer Sixth than Fifth Avenue, and you enter from either 53rd or 54th Street into a lobby, paced with white columns, that cuts all ...”

“... which appeared in early 1959 only two months after the Hanover show, the artist and critic John McHale alludes to Rudolf Arnheim, who first applied Gestalt theory to art, and cites Paul Schilder on the ‘fragmentary associations’ that we fold into our body images. Similar reflections on the infantile development of the corporeal imago had been made ...”

“... with anarchism? The Dadaists would be a good guess, but the truly political ones, such as John Heartfield and George Grosz, were communists, and since the early days of Proudhon and Marx anarchists and communists have been more rivals than comrades. The ultra-composed Neo-Impressionists aren’t obvious angels of chaos, yet Georges Seurat, Camille ...”

“... a fact he doesn’t mention in his account of the incident in his memoirs or even in his diary. John McCloy, FDR’s assistant secretary of war, described it as ‘the most gallant thing I’ve ever seen’. Macmillan wasn’t one of those not infrequent war heroes who in peacetime are mild and eager to please. He remained dauntless and daunting in ...”

“... were excitedly vulnerable to the charms of fame and what came with it, and the men – who, as John Peel (not obviously an abusive monster) said, ‘didn’t ask for ID’ – took their tribute in sexual encounters without concerning themselves with the age of those they were exploiting. Another tweet caught my attention, in the timeline of ...”

“... novels set in the past, such as Kingsley’s Westward Ho! or Hereward the Wake, helped to foster the imperial ideal by suggesting that it was natural for Britains to seek an outlet overseas for all the manly endeavour that would otherwise be unbearably cooped up in one little island. The effect of such novels lasted well into our own century: Graham ...”

“... or literature in society’. And a decade ago, when controversy over the curriculum was at a peak, John Guillory added that debates about literary and artistic canons merely disguised the simple fact that they weren’t very important to anyone’s self-fashioning. By the late 1990s the humanities appeared marginal even to the universities, driven as they were ...”

“... John Nash’s commentary on his 1810 plan for Regent Street was clear about the social implications of what he was suggesting: ‘The whole communication from Charing-Cross to Oxford Street will be a boundary, and complete separation between the Streets and the Squares occupied by the Nobility and Gentry, and the narrower streets and meaner houses occupied by mechanics and the trading part of the community ...”

“... of children and naifs). In the end Debord views St Cobra as a forerunner, an artistic St John to the political SI, a pivot to launch Situationism, which should be presented, he writes early on to Jorn, as ‘the necessary transcendence of that era’. However, Situationism as such does not emerge very distinctly in these letters, largely because, in ...”

“... to experience: learning came by way of doing and making. Aligned with the American pragmatism of John Dewey (who was read at the Bauhaus), this idea was advanced by Albers, who took it with him in 1933 when he went to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and later at Yale, where his impact was immense. For other Bauhauslers experiment was a ...”