“... compulsion to fill every inch of the available paper or canvas with some kind of colouring or mark. Seeing pictures by Wain no doubt prepared me for this obsessive mark-making: the worked-over supports, the tendency to hypnotic patterning and the distorted and ambiguous figure-ground relationships one finds in an ...”

“... acts, artists presumed dead or missing in action, for Norma Desmond divas and the real Michael Jackson, a trembling skin-graft mask cursed with eternal youth. Parrot-scream arias and the cough of angry engines, as punters try to exit the gridlocked car park, carry across a broad expanse of oily water. Thames, Amazon, Congo: crumbling regimes like nothing ...”

“... after she had seen Waller perform a one-night stand with a ragtag big band in her home town of Jackson, Mississippi. Her version of Waller turns out to be a multicultural Proteus and paragon long before the fact of any programme or call for action. ‘Sheik! Sheik!’ he is proclaimed by his men when he wraps a towel around his perspiring head. He looks ...”

“... era. No global hullabaloo of youth culture: impossible to imagine Altamont or Live Aid, Michael Jackson on the Thames, Bono cold calling George Bush mid-gig, Katy Perry in orbit. No personal touchscreen beckoning itchy fingers. Just gazing dreamily into the distance or cycling about aimlessly on long summer afternoons. Boredom and its cloud-drift ...”

“... Macdonald about the passionless ease of the old New Yorker: ‘Its editors would have considered Mark Twain too crude and Heine too highbrow for their purposes … Its inhibitions stretch from sex to the class struggle. It can be read aloud in mixed company without calling a blush to the cheek of the most virtuous banker.’Some of the new magazine’s ...”

“... network television for two months. During those two months, ABC news had 121 stories on Michael Jackson and 42 stories on Natalee Holloway, a high-school student who disappeared from a bar while on holiday in Aruba. CBS news had 235 stories about Michael Jackson and 70 about Natalee Holloway. I heard that in the second ...”

“... in favour of refurbishment. It had originally planned to replace 528 flats with only 120 homes.Mark Slater, a tenant activist who lives on a high floor of one of the Seven Sisters, showed me round his flat. He’s a 72-year-old single man and doesn’t live in luxury, but he has a home. The windows look out on the town below and the moors, Saddleworth and ...”

“... receive the royal nod. Instead, Roth chose Blake Bailey, the well-regarded biographer of Charles Jackson (The Lost Weekend), Richard Yates and John Cheever, three alcohol-plagued novelists whose torments kept late hours. As it happened Atlas would outlive Roth only by a year, dying in September 2019 from complications of a lung condition. At the close of ...”

“... he always got his shoes at Lobb’s), and he would have agreed with his friend the classicist W.F. Jackson Knight that the Great War was ‘a frightfully dressy affair’. Much of this is parodic – he resented the tone-deafness and hauteur of the officer caste – but there is a residue of fascination. Even so, as Jones wrote in 1935, ‘I must be and am ...”

“... trust your guides rather than assuming they will skimp on the job unless they’re kept up to the mark by constant monitoring of their performance indicators. It also has to be said that, even on the proposals’ own cockeyed premises, the system will not actually be driven by ‘student choice’ but by the decisions of schoolchildren and their parents. All ...”

“... deadlines in the phased demilitarisation set out in Thaci’s undertaking. General Sir Michael Jackson, the KFOR commander, to whom the undertaking was given, has said in effect that full disarmament is a pipe-dream, but he’s confident that some sort of demilitarisation schedule will be completed and he’s prepared to stretch a date or two on the ...”

“... as far away as possible from the white man’s freedom to dominate others, as espoused by Andrew Jackson, George Wallace and Trump. These radical traditions have always been embattled, but they have not vanished, and they have been enriched and reinvented by successive waves of immigration.Athird generation​ American, born in 1972, I am an heir to some of ...”

“... American counterparts. Presidential candidates, with the exception of George McGovern and Jesse Jackson, outbid each other in paeans of praise for Israel. The Administration has refurbished the strategic ‘understanding’ it made with Israel during Alexander Haig’s time as Secretary of State, as if the invasion had never happened, the theory being ...”

“... to heaven? Is he playing a game on his PC?On the voice-over to the first Fellowship trailer, Peter Jackson, who directed the movie, portends: ‘The technology has caught up with the incredible imagination that Tolkien injected into that story of his. And so, this is the time.’ Of the many strange things there are to observe about Tolkien, the way his ideas ...”

“... was only a little more realistic than to believe the patronage of Craxi would leave no mark on Berlusconi. Other reminders of the past were no less striking. In the summer of 2012 it emerged that Napolitano was intervening to block potential interrogation of Nicola Mancino, Christian Democrat minister of the interior in 1992 when the Palermo ...”