“... as opinion-makers in the lesser arts fell into step. The Post-Modern is a matter of façade, they said, without any promise of depth. It soaks up and squeezes out but does not judge the commercial culture it is compelled to treat as a second nature. This claim, too, had been made first in architecture, by Robert Venturi: ‘The main justification of the ...”

“... to the accompaniment of rhetorical music. Jefferson, Mississippi is the centre, Faulkner once said, of a ‘cosmos’ inhabited by people whom he could move around ‘like God’. Eudora Welty’s people live mostly in, or near, small free-floating towns like Morgana, with its water tank and courthouse and its ‘Confederate soldier on a shaft’ that ...”

“... enjoyment and the central means to political understanding and intervention. Peter Brook once said he himself had no sense of history as a reality: ‘History to me is a way of looking at things, and-not one that interests me very much’; the artist’s vision is concerned with the present. This view, whatever may be ...”

“... and helpful – in fact, just true. ‘A writer must die every day he lives, be reborn, as it is said in the Burial Service, an incorruptible self, that self opposite of all that he has named “himself”.’ The theory certainly most beautifully fits Conrad, that least stoical, most volatile and hypochondriacal of men, who nevertheless created imperishable ...”

“... for British settler colonies like Rhodesia. While it was Britain’s ‘earnest desire’, he said, to give South Africa, a fellow member of the Commonwealth, its ‘support and encouragement’, ‘some aspects of your policies … make it impossible for us do this.’ ‘Our policy,’ he added, quoting a speech made by his foreign secretary, Selwyn ...”

“... physicists, above all Werner Heisenberg’s: Heisenberg, the winner of the 1932 Nobel Prize, was said to be the head of Hitler’s atom bomb effort. He had also been Edward Teller’s PhD supervisor at Leipzig in 1930. In December 1944, the OSS, the CIA’s wartime predecessor, ordered one of its agents in ...”

“... Stravinsky, utterly uncharacteristically, broke down and wept: He was finished as a composer, he said; the Rake would be his last work. What was more, he felt exposed by Schoenberg’s mastery and incriminated by the years in which he, Stravinsky, had written serialism off as some kind of fin de siècle number-mysticism or chemical experimentation. Craft ...”

“... reaction he sometimes has to face from audiences. At one point, ‘a guy got really angry. He said it wasn’t the audience’s fault they didn’t get what I was doing and I should be better at my job. I thought there was going to be a fight, as he came down to the stage and was hanging about in a menacing way. I had to come out of character and ...”

“... the logic of its principle and the grammar of its intuition’. Johnson, no doubt, would have said he had reality as well as principle to deal with as he pushed through legislation (such as the Civil Rights Act) that Kennedy did not live to fight for. In doing this rough work he proved the classic if wily liberal, the man whom his biographer Robert Caro ...”

“... asked the vice president, Dick Cheney, when the war would end. ‘Not in our lifetime,’ Cheney said. One can picture his barely suppressed smirk, a facial tic familiar from interviews. Cheney, and by implication ‘we’, had embarked on a war to outlast our lifetimes – an endless war. For a member of the ‘Vulcans’, Bush’s foreign policy ...”

“... at my Scottish primary school. I remember the blizzard around the classroom the day Mrs Wallace said it to me, a snow-scene dense enough to make the end of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ appear like a moment’s inclemency. The poet Hugh MacDiarmid had a feeling for the freezing lives of sheep, and he resurrected, or to some extent invented, the words that would ...”

“... he took for his subject the question of value in literature. It is an issue which, he said, had tended to be lazily or discreetly edged aside over the last few decades and had subsequently returned in a new form: concerning ‘canon’-formation and institutional control of the ‘canon’. My periodisation becomes a little shaky here, for his ...”

“... She thrust her forefinger into the wound with grisly relish. One of the priests, Don Scossa, later said: ‘I could not look at it any longer.’ Porzia Catalano, another onlooker, said: ‘I turned my eyes aside so I didn’t have to look, because it frightened me.’ It was not the ghoulish jesting of Dorotea that struck ...”

“... Century articles told him everything about a battle except what it was like. ‘I wonder,’ he said to Linson, ‘that some of these fellows don’t tell how they felt in those scraps.’ He circled the project for quite a while, then wrote Red Badge in pell-mell fury. In one account he got it all down in nine days. Finding a publisher wasn’t easy but ...”

“... elite schools: the progressive Minta gymnasium alone produced Szilárd and his fellow physicists Edward Teller (who rejoiced in the initials E.T.) and Nicholas Kurti, the engineer Theodore von Kármán, and the economists Nicholas Kaldor and Thomas Balogh. They were overwhelmingly Jewish or from a Jewish background. Almost all were non-observant, some ...”