“... after the election, Aaron Sorkin’s rant on the Vanity Fair website: ‘The Klan won last night. White nationalists. Sexists, racists and buffoons … misogynistic shitheads everywhere … If he does manage to be a douche nozzle without breaking the law for four years, we’ll make it through those four years.’ Or consider the message read out to Vice ...”

“... was somehow the cause of the war.’Neiman mentions the so-called Dunning School, named after William Dunning, a professor at Columbia at the turn of the 20th century, who, with his followers, disparaged the efforts made during the Reconstruction to establish the civil and economic rights (forty acres and a mule) of former slaves and gave intellectual ...”

“... a laureate of American empire, openly echoing Kipling as he urges his countrymen to take up the white man’s burden by fighting ‘the savage wars of peace’. He complained continually about Americans’ reluctance to embrace their imperial responsibilities and shed blood abroad. Like other stenographers for the national security state, he was appalled by ...”

“... over ten thousand deaths), it comes to seem probable that the geo-political opening undertaken by William Casey, McFarlane, North and company was nothing less than an attempted coup whose goal was either the fomenting of prolonged instability in Iran or the accession to power of some person or group less hostile to the US and Israel. The man publicly ...”

“... to highlight the shortcomings of the present king, was not the recipient of royal favour. But William Camden was; his famous Annales were written with royal encouragement. Far from playing down his predecessor. James played her up, but in a carefully designed role. She was not the militant champion of the Protestant cause – an image wholly misleading ...”

“... was published in 1928, and again, in a slightly self-censored version, in 1968 – says he asked William Burroughs what he thought. ‘It’s the book that made me want to be a writer,’ Burroughs said. But was it poetry? ‘Of course it’s poetry. It rhymes.’ It is ‘closer to “Frankie and Johnny” than to Tristan and Iseult,’ Spiegelman ...”

“... fine-fleeced sheep that adorns the frieze of the Parthenon (and looks as though it were drawn by William Blake himself), through the sheep of Byzantine mosaics and Mogul paintings, to those of the miniatures of a miscellany of breviaries, psalteries and bestiaries. The habitats of sheep in most countries of the world are illustrated and are identified in a ...”

“... beliefs to the Taylors. Though John was only three years older than Sarah, his prematurely white hair and grave demeanour made him a surprising choice for her. His letter of proposal, a ‘strange, joyless document’, as the Hamburgers call it, was unpromising. No fictional would-be husband in Jane Austen, George Eliot or Meredith outdoes Austin in ...”

“... of light’ (‘The Rosy-fingered’), and ‘I cannot stammer thunder in your sky / Or flash white phrases there’ (‘Fiat’). Stilted grandiloquence and mythic gestures abound. Syntax is often contorted, and the main point of many of the poems seems largely to outdo ‘The Extasie’ in argumentative knottiness. This strenuous manner survives through ...”

“... for whom the papers presume to speak turn out, on inspection, to be some fraction or other of the white ‘talking classes’, each ‘we’ is an imperialist, asserting its claim to be taken as the universal, the consensual ‘we’. Yet each ‘we’ can only be given an identity by specifying which groups it excludes, and which registers of ...”

“... to him. Newton’s annus mirabilis, 1665-6, in which he discovered the calculus, the nature of white light and the theory of gravity, was spent at her house; the apple fell in her garden. Manuel’s theory, put forward with judicious tentativeness, is that Isaac’s early separation from his mother left a wound that never healed. This accounts for his ...”

“... whom Kenner singled out as the most honourable exceptions: Charles Tomlinson, who applauded William Soutar, and Basil Bunting, who befriended MacDiarmid. Yet Tomlinson and Bunting are the true mavericks, as Kenner recognised. They are mavericks because, while acknowledging class-based and region-based resentment, in themselves as in others, they refused ...”

“... version about her godmother, Panna Grady, her mother’s best friend and a friend and patron of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Janet was both disarming and bossy about showing her friends her work. When I first read the account of her arriving at boarding school with her mother, I was staying with her in Key West, in a house she had rented from ...”

“... on these pages. Wood, in fact, appears nowhere in the book, though Vickers several times cites William Wood, a 17th-century chronicler. Moreover, Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992) has lots to say about class hierarchy and the inequalities of wealth; it would be a gross misreading of its argument to say it undervalues social ...”

“... of an emergent conservative movement.In particular, the Eisenhower letter provided an opening for William F. Buckley, the founder-editor of the National Review, to establish some distance between the honest-to-goodness hard right and deluded fantasists like Welch. Although Welch gave financial support to the National Review in 1955, he received little in ...”