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“... petulant, from the performance writers make of their art. A chapter which begins momentously with Joseph Conrad, and develops into a meticulous and heartfelt tribute to Stephen Crane, concludes by recommending an old leather portmanteau as the best possible manure for fig trees. Mrs Gwendolen Bishop no doubt astonished Holland Park Avenue with the splendour ...”

“... of Goldman Sachs executives, might have done better if mixed with economists of other views like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. Obama knew little economics, however, and he took the word of the orthodox. It would have been wiser, from a merely prudential standpoint, to consult Summers behind a screen. But Obama has always craved legitimacy in a ...”

“... who would be castigated in Death in the Afternoon for writing too much and being unedited. Joseph Fruscione’s Faulkner and Hemingway: Biography of a Literary Rivalry shows the two writers dancing round each other for several decades, making much of their differences and generally vying for supremacy.3 But these American modernists, Fitzgerald ...”

“... serious ‘feeder’ – ‘It goes without saying that it is essential to be in France’ – and Joseph Wechsberg did major damage to the magazine’s expenses budget by explaining what Michelin stars meant and then filing reports from every one of France’s three-star establishments. Alice B. Toklas wrote her Cookbook, she said, ‘for America’, partly ...”

“... in office. For twenty years after 1846, Liberal government was kept on the road not just by Lord John Russell and Palmerston but by their two most reliable and businesslike cabinet supporters: Sir George Grey, Charles’s nephew, and Sir Charles Wood, Charles’s son-in-law. Commentators fond of political flamboyance considered both men dispensable, but ...”

“... Yard formed in his mind. It was the architect Leslie Martin who found the cottages, named after a Joseph Kettle who lived there in the 18th century, and Ede saw them for the first time in November 1956. Freeman might have made more of Martin’s involvement both in the conception of Kettle’s Yard and its final form, for which his practice built the ...”

“... to re-enact the deposition of Christ. Church members would assume the roles of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, taking the wooden Christ down from a cross and moving him to a sepulchre on the other side of the church; a sort of theatre in the round.Other devices were more complex, supplying their own motive power and so making them true ...”

“... the outer firth.The bigger and more glamorous yards lay upriver at Dumbarton and Clydebank, where John Brown’s built the Queens for Cunard, and inside Glasgow’s city boundaries, where five or six companies on both banks (among them Harland & Wolff, Fairfield and Barclay Curle) gave Auden his ‘glade of cranes’. Downriver, the engine works and slipways ...”

“... left behind.’ ‘Gay men had as much use for condoms as for tampons,’ France notes. He quotes Joseph Sonnabend, one of the first clinicians to investigate Aids. ‘I think most gay men said: “Oh thank God, that’s one thing we don’t have to worry about.”’ In 1973, a gay bar in New Orleans was deliberately set on fire: 32 people died. No charges ...”

“... nature’s experiments, not as the culmination of nature’s design, echoes Berlin’s use of John Stuart Mill’s phrase ‘experiments in living’. (It also, of course, echoes Jefferson’s and Dewey’s use of the term ‘experiment’ to describe American democracy.) Like Berlin, I have been criticising the Platonic-Kantian attempt to do what Berlin ...”

“... by such luminaries of the conservative movement as Congressman Larry McDonald (head of the John Birch Society), Fred and Phyllis Schafly, Ray Cline (former deputy-director of the CIA), General Daniel Graham (now leader of the High Frontier – i.e. Star Wars – lobby) and Reed Irvine. Irvine brought a fresh raft of influential supporters into the ...”

“... European country). An account of Stevens must be sensual, or it is nothing.I love a quatrain from Joseph Brodsky’s poem ‘Plato Elaborated’: ‘There would be a café in that city with a quite/decent blancmange, where, if I should ask why/we need the twentieth century, when we already/have the nineteenth, my colleague would stare fixedly at his fork or ...”

“... of Mann, ‘the humour of which he was so proud is faint.’ Prater is discussing the four Joseph novels (1933, 1934, 1936, 1943), but as far as I know English-speaking readers have not found Buddenbrooks (1901) or The Magic Mountain (1924) too rollicking either. In his preface to the new Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, Ritchie Robertson says the ...”

“... seemed to understand it, as it were, from the outside. When one of the Martians, the mathematician John von Neumann, was appointed to the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study at the age of 29, a story went around that he was ‘a demigod but had made a thorough, detailed study of human beings and could imitate them perfectly’. In Britain and America, the ...”

“... in mutton grease’. Few things give greater pause for thought to the amnesiac ex-commando in John Lodwick’s ambitiously daft Peal of Ordnance (1947) than the state of the box from which he rings the BBC to tell them he has planted a bomb in one of their studios. The booth smelt of urine and spittle gouts. He opened the directory; obsolete, tatty and ...”