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“... or reflective, reveals. Yet, when we get down to specific cases – whether sculptural effigies of George Washington or the painted flowers of Georgia O’Keeffe – we find that artists inevitably construct and invent their representations of American experience, whatever we may mean by this vague, polymorphous concept, rather than simply revealing a ...”

“... support of the war effort contrasted dramatically with the failure of his Confederate counterpart, Jefferson Davis, to mobilise Southern public opinion effectively. Lincoln led a battle to preserve the Union that fuelled an intense new nationalism, which, in turn, legitimised an unprecedented increase in the powers of the federal government. The Civil War has ...”

“... or translating Rimbaud. Meanwhile, pioneering scholars like Barbara Tuchman, Frank Manuel and George Whalley mined gold year after year from the lodes of ore in the libraries.The roots of this bookish postwar New York, as Denise Gigante shows in Book Madness, stretched back deep into the 19th century. Some of them also nourished Boston’s book culture ...”

“... even a minimal awareness of the circumstances of the eastward push of Nato after 1990. President George H.W. Bush, in return for a united Germany, had promised that Nato would expand ‘not one inch eastward’; and the evacuation of this pledge in the years that followed, under Clinton, the younger Bush and Obama, has rightly been considered a betrayal by ...”

“... took hold. And when he woke, somewhere in South Carolina, Sam was saying how much he admired George W. Bush. ‘I voted for Bush last time,’ he said. ‘I liked the way he handled 9/11. He’s a strong president. Hell, he’s my commander-in-chief.’ Terry gave him a long, weary look, and rubbed his eyes. Neither Sam nor Terry has ever possessed a ...”

“... He ended his travels with an eventful month in the United States, where he dined with President Jefferson, met various notables, and had his portrait painted by Charles Willson Peale. Often arduous and sometimes extremely dangerous, Humboldt’s American adventure became one of the new century’s most famous journeys, the foundation for his own ...”

“... the United States. The book contains some surreally potted history, whisking us from feudalism to Jefferson in three pages; it also feels the need to explain what ‘homo sapiens’ and ‘xenophobia’ mean, though not ‘genealogies’ or ‘taxonomy’. Even so, it is crammed with intriguing data. We learn that it was the journalist Walter Lippmann who ...”

“... third was cultural: Gypsies represented ‘paradise lost to modern industrial society’. In 1857, George Borrow published The Romany Rye, a novel about someone who was ‘not a Gypsy, who loves the race and has mastered the tongue’. As a young man, Borrow had travelled across Spain on behalf of the Bible Society, hawking his translations of the Gospel of ...”

“... Marxist and Fascist readings have tugged at it repeatedly. Both Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and George Eliot’s Felix Holt have processed it for their own purposes. The play seems always to have functioned as a kind of arena. However, Patterson’s concern to establish what the ‘text of Coriolanus itself’ has to say presumes to stand aside from all ...”

“... societies in history still comes as a shock to some. In a widely circulated essay in the Atlantic, George Packer claimed that ‘every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state.’ In fact, the state has been AWOL for decades, and the market has been entrusted with the tasks most societies reserve ...”

“... last deep coal mine at Longannet flooded and closed down for ever in March 2002, a man called George came home from the pit to find his telephone ringing. ‘Dinnae worry, big man, we’ll see you’re no stuck for work.’ This is a nation at home in hard, stony times. It will find its own way in the world. This is a cold, hard jet of pure ...”

“... the Declaration of Independence were indeed theologically heterodox, including Adams, Franklin and Jefferson. There had been ferocious episodes of sectarian strife within recent memory, such as the attempt to create a colonial bishop in 1767-70, or the vocal reaction to the Quebec Act (1774), which recognised Catholicism in Canada, two episodes which Clark ...”

“... has his native wits about him, has he profited much from living abroad? In half-praise of George Steiner, Davie floats ‘a tradition of high-flying speculation about literature, which we costive islanders cannot afford not to profit by’. ‘Speculation’, ‘afford’ and ‘profit’ put a poet’s pressure on ‘costive’. Yet should Davie ...”

“... Then there was the coronation of Edward VII, his funeral eight years later, the coronation of George V, and the outbreak of war in 1914. All these events could be and often were commemorated by schools in song, and the Tonic Sol-fa movement, with its concentration on singing in unison, was perfect for encouraging national songs as demonstrations of ...”

“... in ‘anti-slavery gestures’, but it did lead to renunciation of further imports from Africa. Jefferson the Virginian slave-holder quite approved of this, realising that farmers and artisans in the Northern States where blacks were few did not want any more to be brought in to compete with them: but he helped to give slavery a wider diffusion in the new ...”