“... To Hester, Johnson was at once a mentor and ‘a great man-child’, while acting as, in Jackson Bate’s phrase, ‘a combination of friend and a sort of toy elephant’ to her children. He was particularly fond of the eldest, Hester Maria, a reserved, secretive and wilful girl he nicknamed ‘Queeney’. Uninterested in what her mother tried to ...”

“... House of Adams’ is ‘buried’ and ‘beyond recovery’. History in the guise of Andrew Jackson and U.S. Grant had seen to that. Ancestral traits presaged the family’s decline. The Adamses had good reason to think well of themselves (they had ‘held in succession every position of dignity and power their nation could give’), but they were a ...”

“... wife Alice, in America. During this grim time he consulted a pioneer Freudian analyst, James Jackson Putnam, in Boston and obtained some benefit. However, in writing to Putnam the following year to announce himself as definitively cured, he explained his cure in terms of the homeliest old-fashioned self-help. The ‘real clue to the labyrinth’ and ...”

“... Sash and curse the Pope of Rome.They held a pistol so hard against his foreheadthere was still the mark of an O when he got home.One of the finest poems, and typically tantalising, is the title poem from Why Brownlee left, about a man who vanishes into thin air one morning, leaving his team still harnessed to the plough:Shifting their weight from foot ...”

“... Krasner hearing a book go hurtling across the studio next to hers, smashing against a wall, and Jackson Pollock emerging with the words: ‘Goddamn it! That guy has done everything. There’s nothing left.’ But the further point of the anecdote is that Pollock did find ways, eventually, to turn the ‘everything’ to his advantage. That was partly ...”

“... American sublime of Abstract Expressionism went flat; it seemed a thing of the past. Not anymore: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman come to life again, and this reanimation is charged by the female company they now keep, once overlooked peers such as Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell. At the ...”

“... were smart and talented, as were the painters associated with the gallery: William de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Grace Hartigan, Alfred Leslie, Larry Rivers, Norman Bluhm and Fairfield Porter. It all made for a vigorous little scene, a fair bit of it played ...”

“... radically alien. Even that wasn’t the end of it. The banning of prayer in schools seemed to mark the expulsion of religious morality from the American state; the renewal of mass immigration, suspended between the mid-1920s and the mid-1960s, brought the white middle and working class face to face with a new set of ethnic challenges and rivals; and the ...”

“... No Pumps! No Surgery!’). Another site, registered to the same address on Heslington Road by ‘Mark Smith’, apparently an alias for Entwistle, was deephotsex.co.uk, which promised ‘Over 150,000 images of innocent teens’, ‘Real World Hidden Sex Cams’ and ‘Live sex shows where you tell girls what to do’. The nastiness of these efforts ...”

“... of the enshrined practices of the Athenian and Roman republics by Philip of Macedon and Mark Antony (although those of Demosthenes were calls to arms rather than constitutional critiques).There are at least six books now in print with the words ‘Assault on Truth’ in their titles: Oborne’s; Jeffrey Masson’s polemic against the slipperiness of ...”

“... Falling sickness was the popular name for epilepsy from the second century on. Temkin’s question mark denotes his caution about assuming we’ve left old ideas behind. His history extends from ancient Greece to the second half of the 19th century, when the modern discipline of neurology and more sophisticated medical investigations of epilepsy emerged in ...”

“... it is widespread. Here are writers who have spared themselves the discomforts attendant on what W. Jackson Bate has termed ‘the remorseless deepening of self-consciousness before the rich and intimidating legacy of the past’ through the simple expedient of ignoring the past. What then deepens is another sort of self-consciousness, and it is sad to think of ...”

“... up at 3 a.m. every morning and walks a mile to reach the stables in time for the 4 a.m. feed. Park Jackson, where she works, is ‘bottom of the barrel’ – ‘all kinds of crap went on.’ The horses she tends to are cheap, worn out or past their prime. Because thoroughbreds bleed from the lungs during intense exercise, some trainers tie wire around the top ...”

“... in hobbydom. These people can write code (which is geekspeak for ‘write computer programs’), mark up HTML to create web pages, and know not only what’s going on, but also what’s about to go on. Above them are the übergeeks, the illuminati of the digital revolution: the kind of people, to use one example from Po Bronson’s entertaining Silicon ...”