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“... crows while playing ‘Mandy’, his punning verb covering the way he attacks the ivories and Irving Berlin’s song. He is surprisingly hard on the sweet little melody, with its banal – or cute (a close critical call) – rhyme scheme: ‘Mandy’, ‘handy’, ‘dandy’. Waller trills ‘Lalala-lee-lo’ quite sarcastically and scrambles the lyrics ...”

“... York’s Lower East Side, the whole family had appeared to be so unremarkable that the historian John Neville would say that ‘they might have been chosen at random from the telephone directory.’ Ethel’s father, Barney Greenglass, repaired sewing machines. Her mother, Tessie, was from Galicia (now part of Ukraine), and raised their four children in a ...”

“... contemporaneously. But the three officers connected with these documents – Vernon Attwell, John Donaldson and Thomas Style – had signed witness statements in December 1974 stating that the manuscript notes were contemporaneous, and they had repeated this on oath in the trial in 1975. If the rough typed notes were indeed a draft from which the ...”

“... lore had Warhol moving into bed with his mother while his father slept upstairs with Paul and John [Warhol’s siblings],’ Gopnik writes. When Julia moved to New York to live with her son, people ‘thought she was stupid’, a friend said, ‘but she was brilliant beyond belief … and much smarter than Andy.’In high school, Warhol was not known for ...”

“... and envol drapings – and in the excess of fabric: 18 metres for just one outfit. The designer John Cavanagh sat through the show ‘transfixed … in tears. The relief was overwhelming; the relief of seeing total beauty again.’ The government sent Madge Garland to Paris with £1000 to procure samples for British designers to copy. Garland had been ...”

“... Dwight Macdonald recalled. He was simply, bathetically, Delmore. Schwartz once conceded to John Berryman that ‘Delmorean’ would be the word used should his ‘verse prove attractive to posterity’. Posterity has not proved kind, something Ben Mazer’s edition of Schwartz’s Collected Poems sets out to redress. But this sprawling volume is no ...”

“... phenomenon. So there is plenty to look at; it is our fault if we can’t see. An Englishman called John Carr, travelling in Paris in 1802, was surprised by a bust ‘taken of him, a short period before he fell’. He noted:History, enraged at the review of the insatiable crimes of Robespierre, has already bestowed on him a fanciful physiognomy, which she has ...”

“... realist? His engagement with the Communist Party – he had been a leader of the Chicago John Reed Club, the CPUSA writers’ group, and published journalism in The New Masses – contributed, but Wright’s relationship with the party had always been stormy, particularly when it came to aesthetics. His 1937 manifesto, ‘Blueprint for Negro ...”

“... of the now lost ‘critic as intellectual’, those emblematic figures such as Trilling or Irving Howe who assumed their cultural inheritance in the 1940s and 1950s. Wilson, born in 1895, came into his own in the 1920s. It underlines his remoteness to recall that he had already graduated from Princeton before America entered the First World War. His ...”

“... does not treat the actual life of Welles or its salient circumstances: his collaborations with John Houseman and Joseph Cotten and Michéal Mac Liammóir; his affairs with Dolores Del Rio and Lena Horne, and his marriage to Rita Hayworth; complicated relationships, usually rounded up to some sort of friendship, with the great producers of the day who used ...”

“... and thank you’, the orchestra launches into an 18-second version (it fades out) of Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’ – generated spontaneously, it seems, because they sound like a high-school marching band at its first rehearsal. Ellington had never before performed ‘God Bless America’ (famously recorded by Kate Smith in 1939) and ...”

“... In his landmark zoological study ‘The New York Intellectuals’, published in Dissent in 1968, Irving Howe patronised Sontag as ‘a publicist able to make brilliant quilts from grandmother’s patches’, a ‘highly literate spokesman’ for those ‘who have discarded or not acquired intellectual literacy’. But the notion that Sontag was slumming or ...”

“... the cinematography or the design.It was the beginning of the off-network TV tsunami that John Landgraf, the head of FX, calls peak TV. By 2022, he estimates that there were 559 scripted original shows on American television. HBO followed The Sopranos with Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Deadwood, Entourage, True Blood, Boardwalk ...”

“... than winning the National Book Award for a first book? With Saul Bellow, Leslie Fiedler, Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin in his corner – ‘four tigers’, as he describes them, of American Jewish literature – it might have been possible to ignore the fringe of pious malcontents, but appeasement has never gained ground in Roth’s personal style. In ...”