“... with what it means to belong. ‘For they are touchy and proud these Jazz Age heroines,’ Margo Jefferson wrote. They read widely, wear soigné frocks, give smart parties and make clever remarks. They have keen minds, keen features and fair skin, and can be suitably ironic about ‘what called itself Negro society’. They cultivate the advantage of being ...”

“... case. Taped interviews with eight or so concerned onlookers (some of them, like Christopher Ricks, George Steiner and Gore Vidal, younger candidates for sagedom) are cut and rearranged to give a chronological sense of each career, but also a whiff of the blood and cordite of intellectual warfare. The purpose is not quite literary biography or portraiture, for ...”

“... stirred. Kate Loveman’s new book traces the way Evelyn’s triumph prompted the master, George Neville, to consider whether he ought to do something about the 17th-century diary in his collection. He lent the first volume to an uncle, who passed it to another uncle, who advised Neville to find ‘some man for whom the lucre of gain will sacrifice a ...”

“... camera discredited their expression of piety otherwise displayed. (Frame Analysis) Sharper than George V, he spots a button undone: Young psychiatrists in state mental hospitals who are sympathetic to the plight of the patients sometimes express distance from their administrative medical role by affecting shirts open at the collar, much as do socialists in ...”

“... In the historical situation of the American colonies, they were going to choose them whether George III and Lord North liked it or not. There was no point in arguing with that political fact: ‘I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against an whole people.’ Burke’s opposition to the American war has a further dimension which comes ...”

“... been incorporated into the triumphalist narrative. The reductio ad absurdum of this process was George W. Bush’s speech in the summer of 2003, on Gorée Island off the coast of Senegal – a notorious depot in the slave trade. By resisting injustice, Bush announced, ‘the very people traded into slavery helped to set America free.’ Even the traffic in ...”

“... proportion of white male Republican voters typically reaches landslide proportions, as it did for George W. Bush. Before Johnson the only Southern Democrat to have been elected President since the Civil War was Woodrow Wilson, who had built his political career in New Jersey; since Johnson, no non-Southern Democrat has gone to the White House. Losing its ...”

“... at the Warehouse in Chicago, along with DJ Ron Hardy. As Chicago music-makers like Marshall Jefferson, Farley ‘Jackmaster’ Funk and Joe Smooth started making records that filled the dancefloor there, so, locally, their music began to be described as having a ‘Warehouse’ or, simply, a ‘house’ sound. House music evolved out of disco and relied ...”

“... of East Harlem, whereby the population was moved into large, spacious high-rise flats like the George Washington Houses; the ‘middle-income’ towers (what would now be called ‘luxury flats’) of Stuyvesant Town in Lower Manhattan; and the cultural ‘ghetto’ of the Lincoln Center, itself adjacent to a dense concentration of housing projects. These ...”

“... at the start. I enjoyed anticipating the annoyance that would be caused by calling Franklin and Jefferson ‘Creoles’, as if they were simply an extension of patterns everywhere visible south of the US border, and by commenting that Simón Bolívar was a more impressive figure than George Washington. In the same ...”

“... who hails first shall ask, What ship’s that? then he that is hailed shall answer King George then he who hailed first shall answer Queen Charlotte, and the other shall answer God Preserve.’ If the crews really got out of touch they were to leave messages in bottles at pre-assigned beaches or map readings. It helps also, in reading not Cook but ...”

“... option for restless spirits: a motive that can be traced back to early Victorian times, when George Borrow’s fascination with Spanish or Gypsy low life was bred of detestation for native ‘gentility’. On the other hand, Britain’s Imperial primacy – whose memory long outlasted its reality – inevitably encouraged dreams of daring exploits in ...”

“... à la Nato has been a peppery dish. There were several chefs involved: Bill and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and their exemplar Tony Blair. They all wanted to convert the populace to an enlightened internationalism, but along the way they forgot to talk us out of nationalism. The military operations that dismantled Yugoslavia and overthrew ...”

“... in whom could be represented the stable unity of the government, it was America, in the person of George Washington. The three Presidents who followed him – Adams, Jefferson, Madison – were all lucky men (of the founders, only Hamilton’s luck ran out, when he was fatally wounded in a duel with Vice-President Aaron ...”

“... novels of proud, articulate men, destroyed by forces beyond their control. He was born in 1909 in Jefferson City, the state capital of Missouri, across the street from the Lincoln Institute, where his father, Joseph, taught blacksmithing and wheelwrighting. Chester’s parents were both children of former slaves, members of the ‘second generation’ of ...”