“... The Trump spectacle often ends with insult imitating satire.)Fred Trump, Donald’s father, was a king of Queens; the Donald became a joker in Manhattan. In search of fame and greater fortune in the big city, he set out from the family mansion with its 23 rooms, nine bathrooms and, at the front, four white columns adorned with a confected family crest. A ...”

“... natural-history keeper staged annual cremations of Sloane’s decaying entomological specimens. John Cannon, an eminent plant taxonomist, reveals that after contemplating Sloane’s herbarium ‘one is left with a slight nagging feeling of anti-climax’ because the collector had the misfortune to live just before taxonomy became a proper science with ...”

“... and glorious’. He leapt like Marcus Curtius into the gulf, taking with him, according to John Barrell, the whole moribund tradition of High Art. Haydon’s status as one of the few literal martyrs to critical theory makes him an appropriate, if somewhat ominous subject for Painting and the Politics of Culture. Here the questions raised implicitly in ...”

“... As anyone who has directed a remake of King Kong knows, revisiting classics is a perilous business. However much you claim to stand on the shoulders of the mighty beast, you still risk ending up, like Fay Wray, squeezed in its paw. A.M. Gibbs spends most of the introduction to Bernard Shaw: A Life justifying his decision to return to a very well-ploughed furrow ...”

“... detail, of diaries or intimate correspondence. There is no easy opportunity of the kind offered by John Evelyn or Samuel Pepys, his contemporaries, to explore details of Wren’s domestic affairs or private reflections. Tinniswood’s Wren is a thoroughly public figure: Tory MP, wealthy knight and brilliant don, agile at winning backing from hostile ...”

“... from our heads/But when we first agreed to put them on’). As well as translating War Primer, John Willett, co-editor of the new Collected Works, has revised his volume of essays, Brecht in Context. Although hostile to John Fuegi’s argument, set out in The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht (1994), that Brecht’s ...”

“... He is a real person. I met him once and talked with him. He was amiable and decent, or distant.John Bleasdale’s The Magic Hours is both a monument to unstoppable research and, in the end, an admission that even such a thorough inquiry can remain inconclusive. Bleasdale hasn’t been able to talk to Malick, or to his family. But he has interviewed some of ...”

“... My friend and fellow crime writer John Creasey published more than seven hundred books under some twenty different names. (He also found time to found a political party called rather grandly the All Party Alliance, although a wit said that his only allies were Anthony Morton, Gordon Ashe, Michael Halliday and other Creasey pseudonyms ...”

“... Fast food can easily stand for all that is wrong with America, but that is not the way John Jakle, a professor of geography, and Keith Sculle, a professor of history, see it. The trenchantly anti-ironic Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age is the third book in a trilogy that includes a volume on motels and another on gas ...”

“... of lyrics, Goddard is the culmination of all his rock ’n’ roll predecessors – Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen – as well as what’s best in funk, soul, reggae – and, of course, the influence of such master saloon singers as Nat King Cole and ...”

“... over the past decade, and a selection, entitled Severe Joy, is listed for publication next year by John Calder. They abound in fantastic, and often very funny, descriptions of the people he disapproves of (such as Mrs Thatcher, Enoch Powell, Ian Paisley, the Royal Family and Jesus Christ) engaged in eccentric forms of sexual intercourse. One might almost ...”

“... care for everyone. Join her. Join Bill. We can make the future. I remember how I felt listening to John Kennedy’s inaugural address as a 12-year-old schoolgirl. I was excited but anxious, aware that I was too young. It wasn’t yet time for my generation. Perhaps it would be time now. Embarrassed by my reverie and my emotion, I pull myself back to the ...”

“... in modern art. Reading Gaston, I was reminded repeatedly of paintings by Lawrence Alma-Tadema and John William Waterhouse. Pater’s interest in these works might help us to understand their appeal not only to his contemporaries, but to audiences today. Queen Margaret of Navarre is first mentioned in the novel with a Greek quotation that links her to ...”

“... east using the logogrammatic sign NIM. In Akkadian cuneiform, it was referred to as Elamtu. After King Ashurbanipal’s library in Nineveh was discovered in 1853, there was no longer any doubt. The Babylonian records were full of wars with the Elamites. Linear Elamite writing was used at least from the reign of ...”

“... the writings of an unlikely set of predecessors: Edmund Burke, the eccentric Jeffersonians John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke, Old School Presbyterian defenders of slavery, T.S. Eliot, Karl Marx, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Nashville Agrarians and their latterday apostles, Richard Weaver and ...”