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“... to escape was Shakespearean theatre. Although the British military authorities who took over the John Street theatre in New York during the hostilities must have wondered whether the productions of Richard III, King Lear, The Taming of the Shrew and Macbeth that they staged there between 1777 and 1783 were the last performances of Shakespeare or of anything ...”

“... clarity of seeing, an acknowledgment that this is what painting is. Just as the young John Richardson, visiting Braque’s studio for the first time, felt that he had arrived ‘at the very heart of painting’. But these apparently quiet artists often turn out to have been more far-sighted and more radical than we assume. Corot, for example, once ...”

“... paper notes – so-called ‘Bradburys’ (the name of the Treasury official who signed them was John Bradbury) – to get more money into circulation. Now that war had been declared it was even less likely that the City’s banks would receive payment for prewar bills of exchange, so the Bank of England offered to take £120 million of unmarketable assets ...”

“... been the most sanguine studio. After a trip to Germany in 1934, MGM’s most powerful producer, Irving Thalberg, reported that ‘a lot of Jews will lose their lives [but] Hitler and Hitlerism will pass.’ Warner Brothers was the least compliant, and the first to pull out, at the end of 1933. Columbia, Disney, RKO and Universal followed in 1936 ...”

“... of the Standard Oil Company, the series did little to celebrate the company or its founder, John D. Rockefeller. ‘It is doubtful if there has ever been a time since 1872 when he has run a race with a competitor and started fair,’ Tarbell wrote. But she didn’t call for an end to the corporate form Rockefeller had done so much to ...”

“... But the cultural Cold War has proved more difficult to assess; no single study can match John Lewis Gaddis’s We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997). Unlike power bloc politics, cultural matters were bound up with local histories, deep-seated traditions and long-standing stereotypes. It is worth asking, indeed, whether there was such a ...”

“... of a Struggle’ or certain scenes in The Castle). ‘No other writer of our century,’ Irving Howe has written, ‘has so strongly evoked the claustral sensations of modern experience, sensations of bewilderment, loss, guilt, dispossession … The aura of crisis hanging over Kafka’s life and work is at once intimately subjective, his alone, and ...”

“... loss of her daughter – that fixed her reputation.I never met Didion or her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, but in September 1974 I heard Didion speak one evening in the Branford College common room at Yale. Dunne was there as well, stepping in when her voice began to trail off. I was teaching a non-fiction seminar on Wednesday evenings that year ...”

“... ago someone I know was working on a book about the Near case. He mentioned this in the hearing of Irving Shapiro, an American industrialist who was the chairman of the DuPont Company, and Mr Shapiro said: ‘I knew Mr Near.’ Irving Shapiro’s father owned a small dry-cleaning shop in Minneapolis. Gangsters demanded ...”

“... herself; the trouble was that Peters did too.In the autumn of 1973, Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, had approached Warner Bros offering to write a new version of A Star Is Born. The original film from 1937 and its 1954 remake with Judy Garland had been set in Hollywood, but Didion and Dunne wanted to explore the music industry. Several ...”

“... fault the prose and didn’t think it malicious. Others disagreed. The matter was taken up by Irving Howe in the New Republic. ‘Nothing more cruel has happened to an American writer,’ he wrote, ‘than the Lillian Ross interview, a scream of vanity and petulance that only a journalistic Delilah would have put into print.’ Friend or ex-friend, she ...”

“... between the appearance of Thomas Pynchon’s first book and the Beatles’ second long-player, John Williams, a professor at the University of Denver, sent his agent in New York a draft of his latest novel, which detailed the unhappy marriage, undistinguished career and early death from cancer of an imagined professor at the University of Missouri a ...”

“... from the left itself. The gallery of socialist apostates includes Max Eastman, James Burnham and Irving Kristol. Rodgers, though, focuses on a less dramatic and arguably more significant mode of disillusion on the left. Reared to think of state intellectuals as the agents of progress, Keynesians in the 1970s underwent a critical crisis of confidence. Already ...”

“... intellectuals, most of them young enough to have been Chagall’s sons, were suitably ambivalent. Irving Howe dismissed Chagall’s ‘softened and sweetened’ version of the shtetl. Harold Rosenberg was more tolerant in his condescension: ‘The distinction of Chagall’s ghetto recollections lies in his tenderness.’ Clement Greenberg had the most ...”

“... one of the most famous stories of the day, a poltergeist that plagued the lives of the Irving family in a remote farmhouse on the Isle of Man.* Gef hurled objects, killed rabbits, spat at the family and stole from them, but he also spoke several languages. ‘I am the Fifth Dimension!’ he apparently shouted. ‘I am the Eighth Wonder of the ...”