“... his first book, from 1958, and republished it in 2001, with an introduction by his friend John Ashbery.* Schuyler is first and last a poet, but the other books shed interesting light on the poetry. ‘For readers of his poetry, the idea of the Diary of James Schuyler might almost seem like too much of a good thing,’ begins Nathan Kernan’s ...”

“... who early in his career restaged great watery history paintings – The Raft of the ‘Medusa’, Washington Crossing the Delaware – as surfing scenes, has long been picking California’s allegorical crops. A Southern California surfer himself, he once painted a brilliant series – In Smog and Thunder: Historical Works from the Great War of the ...”

“... exists in two versions, one now in the Whitney Museum, the other in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The photograph also survives, guarding its own pathos and dim beauty. All three show him as a boy with smooth hair and a neat coat, holding a small bouquet in well-articulated fingers. He is standing next to his seated mother, who wears an enveloping ...”

“... of fashionable life. He thrilled at an expedition to view the huge painting by Emanuel Leutze of Washington crossing the Delaware, his excitement in the ‘wondrous flare of projected gaslight’ all the greater for his awareness that it would otherwise be the hour for bed. At home there was the large painting of Florence by Thomas Cole that covered half a ...”

“... had glowing reviews from commentators such as Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute in Washington DC, who wrote that the weapons had ‘transformed the strategic dynamic 180 degrees’ in Idlib in just five days. The enthusiasm is easy to fathom. Drones create their own marketing commercials in the form of the streaming video they transmit to their ...”

“... Local and state governments aided and abetted the intruders, but at first officials in Washington sided with the Native Americans, who had signed treaties with the federal government that ceded much of their land but guaranteed ownership of the rest in perpetuity. Even President Andrew Jackson, whose career, Cowie writes, revealed a ‘merciless ...”

“... ahead, and waited for them to make a move.The impetuosity of Allied generals, and their masters in Washington and Whitehall, was gradually tempered by this reality. Their armies soon faced another string of defences – the Gustav Line – transecting Italy from the Garigliano River in the west to Ortona in the east, through the Apennines and across the ...”

“... home: Philby in Ambala, India, son of the eccentric explorer of Arabia (and Ford motor agent) St John Philby; Sorge in Baku, Russia to a German petroleum engineer and his Russian wife, the daughter of a prosperous capitalist from Kiev. Politically, Sorge’s lineage was even more exotic than Philby’s: while his father was a staunch subject of the ...”

“... a wallpaper brush. I go to an uninformative briefing with my new friends in the RAF. Group Captain John Fynes says: ‘I’ve been told I’m not to lie to you.’ I ask if this is a new policy.28 February. I am due to have lunch with Entisar, an Iraqi woman living in Kuwait I met when I was here a few weeks ago. She thinks I look like Tony Blair, which I do ...”

“... to the US. As fluent in Ayn Rand as he was in English, Netanyahu flourished in Reagan’s Washington, where laissez-faire economics and Revisionist Zionism were the twin pillars of right-wing think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. He rehearsed for interviews in front of video cameras, and learned to ‘keep his ...”

“... 1949. He took well to the re-establishment of relations with the US and led a party delegation to Washington in 1980. But his later political career points more to a commitment to party discipline than to any reformist conviction. After his stint in Guangdong, he was elected to the Politburo and was again put in charge of dealing with Tibet and ...”

“... because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area around Coole and its people. ‘John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought/All that we did, all that we said or sang/Must come from contact with the soil.’ Much of Yeats’s work on Irish folklore was, as Foster points out, a collaboration with Lady Gregory.Lady Gregory also wrote ...”

“... for class insecurity. This underdog cockiness persisted for decades, serving as the driver of John Travolta’s sidewalk strut in 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, where disco prince Tony Manero eventually tires of Bay Ridge Brooklyn and his mooky friends as the magic spires of Manhattan beckon. A product of the jukebox era, Podhoretz belonged to an older ...”

“... proprietary rights over territories ‘lost’ by incompetent Presidents or neglectful officials. John Stempel’s book Inside the Iranian Revolution exemplifies this attitude. As Deputy Chief of the Political Section of the US Embassy, Stempel served in Tehran during the critical years from 1975 to mid-1979, after the fall of the Shah, when most of the ...”

“... Lover’, ‘Hill of the Bees’, ‘A Myth Enacted’, ‘Slow Bell from the High Hill’, ‘John Hunter’s Canal’, ‘The Lawn of Trees and Rocks’, ‘Quelle Histoire’, and (an unusual exertion of sympathy) ‘Dulled Son of Man’. In a poem to Ivor Gurney, Grigson, who can sometimes be magnanimous to the dead, hails Gurney as a poet of ...”