“... who profited from the existing order and those on whom its burden chiefly fell’. His book on Andrew Jackson tried to explain why he was not simply the champion of white frontiersmen (one reason his portrait is back up in the Trump White House), but, more important, fought on behalf of downtrodden men in the eastern cities against a National Bank that had ...”

“... childhood was happy and ordinary’) is part of a popularising mission. He wants to make Wallace a saint: ‘This hopeful, hurtful, energetic, angry, despairing, optimistic, shy product of the American Midwest,’ he writes in the preface to the UK edition, ‘for all the dark moments of his life, never stopped being a purer version of ourselves.’ But it’s ...”

“... call for a profound articulation of the Black Tradition and incidentally made her ‘the patron saint of rebellion’, according to Crouch. Her singing, an African-American critic wrote in the Philadelphia Tribune in 1966, brought the listener ‘into abrasive contact with the black heart and to feel the power and beauty which for centuries have beat ...”

“... this partakes at once of municipal worthy, folk hero, national icon, monarch, pagan god, Catholic saint and Messiah. (The last analogy is made all but inescapable by the name of Shakespeare’s mother, and even as sober an account of his life as Honan’s sounds at times like a Victorian carol: ‘In early life he must have been the focus of Mary’s very ...”

“... the heavens, where is the Church, the typified ark.’In the 12th century, the theologian Hugh of Saint-Victor grappled with the literal aspects of the story, devoting individual chapters to the size and shape of the ark. Genesis is rather elliptical about the ark’s form: the word used to describe it (tevah in Hebrew) appears only once more in the Hebrew ...”

“... both old and new to me then. Burns was ever a slave to the farming business: he is the patron saint of struggling farmers and poor soil. But in actual fact, despite our thoughts and our recovery from our thoughts, in the early 1970s British farming was in a pretty good state. J.G.S. and Frances Donaldson’s Farming in Britain Today, published around this ...”

“... had indeed seen a barely imagined kingdom.’ Herbert is still commonly thought of as an Anglican saint, selfless country priest and poet of divine love. The saintly image was established by Herbert’s early biographers, most fully by Izaak Walton, whose Life of Herbert (1670) devotes half its length to the first 37 years of Herbert’s life, in which he was ...”

“... followed in the 1960s – the Second Piano Sonata, the Concerto for Orchestra and The Vision of Saint Augustine – retained the mosaic form of King Priam, while harmony became like putty in Tippett’s hands, morphing into weird and wonderful shapes.Reading the responses of Tippett’s fellow composers to his late works, I wonder if I am listening to the ...”

“... scandalous’. (It was also to challenge père Sartre, author of the massive Genet portrait Saint Genet.) Glas seems to have left Genet, the contaminating agent, at a loss for words, as it did most readers.Derrida’s closest intellectual comrade in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the writer and editor Philippe Sollers, who published a number of ...”

“... northern half, including California, and renamed the port town of Yerba Buena after the Italian saint. It has always been populated by dreamers, eccentrics and bohemians as well as opportunists and profiteers; until recently there was room for all of them. The Big Four railroad barons were Sacramento merchants who made small fortunes equipping ...”

“... biographer, does emphasise that there is no documentary proof of the link, and both he and Andrew Lycett in his Life of Conan Doyle agree that this was ‘a brave act of solidarity on Willie’s part’. That’s an understatement. It was on the day of Oscar Hornung’s birth, 24 March 1895, that Frank Harris met Wilde at the Café Royal and advised ...”

“... or beams sticking out unattached at one end or put there to hold up a rococo cupid or a concrete saint’. So it was praised for what it wasn’t, and its not being this or that was one of the striking things about it, although the residue of Imagism was obvious enough: Closed car-closed in glass- At the curb, Unapplied and empty: A thing among others Over ...”

“... purpose (do we really need to know that Roth wrote to the co-op board on behalf of his agent, Andrew Wylie? Or that Roth’s friend Joel Conarroe read a goofy telegram at Roth’s sixtieth birthday bash purportedly from John Updike that began ‘Masel gov, you alte cocker’?), but it concretises the sense of comprehensiveness to an impressive, even ...”

“... bus pass which he scrutinises as grimly as an Albanian border guard, even checking the likeness. Andrew Wilson sails through unchallenged.I walk back through the streets of Oxford and as always I have a sense of being shut out and that there is something going on here that I’m not a part of; not that I was a part of it even when I was a part of it.16 ...”

“... have an otherworldly and dreamlike quality that is as thrilling as anything in cinema. The critic Andrew Sarris wrote that watching their close-ups was like ‘gorging on chocolate sundaes’. His face is as sculpted as hers is soft. ‘Do I make you nervous?’ she asks him as she enters a pool room wearing a pale strapless gown with flowers all over the ...”