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“... intelligentsia – but it is a scholar’s approach to the novels, not to their author. Professor Jackson’s study is more nicely balanced between, as it were, the human and the critical; and it is particularly strong on the relation of Dostoevsky’s novels to the literature of the time, complementing in that respect the massive literary biographies of ...”

“... might verge on narrow-mindedness; the game might bore us. But the rulings were clear: by 1954, Jackson Pollock’s paintings were ‘forced’ and ‘dressed up’; Clyfford Still never left the minor league; Marcel Duchamp was a joker (not in a good way); Morris Louis painted as brilliantly as Raphael. In a 1959 ...”

“... of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, as well as politicians such as William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette and even (for a while) Woodrow Wilson, whose New Freedom campaign of 1912 proposed to renew entrepreneurial opportunities through anti-trust and regulatory policies. He recalls a certain kind of populist progressive: distrustful of big business ...”

“... works of the so-called second generation Abstract Expressionists. She claimed that her visit to Jackson Pollock’s exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950 changed her sense of what could be done with colour, space, line and movement – and convinced her of the value of allusiveness over narrative. ‘It was as if I suddenly went to a foreign ...”

“... the blinding flash of the first atomic explosion revealed their labours had not been in vain.J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist in charge of the Manhattan Project and hence ‘father of the atomic bomb’, was never openly remorseful. But he was nothing if not ambivalent, as Ray Monk makes clear in his superb biography. When the fireball burst Oppenheimer ...”

“... years’. In Newsweek, Walter Shapiro found it ‘the best aide’s-eye view of politics since Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men’. In the New Republic, Matthew Cooper, after revealing (‘full disclosure’) that he himself is now dating Mandy Grunwald, who held the position in the Clinton campaign of the novel’s sexy heroine Daisy ...”

“... The welfare state became the warfare state – an outcome Roosevelt neither foresaw nor desired. Robert Dallek is troubled by the absence of leadership in contemporary American politics, and his biography of FDR is meant to show us what the real thing looks like. ‘In this time of demoralisation,’ he writes, ‘it seems well to remind Americans that the ...”

“... abandoning the town: ‘It is more than likely we will have to give it up,’ Voltaire said. Louis XV required few incentives to cede the territory to Spain in 1762. Why build a city on land that was described, as early as 1720, as ‘flooded, unhealthy, impracticable; fit for nothing save growing rice’? It is the crucial question about New ...”

“... The Compleat Drawing-Book​, published by Fleet Street printseller Robert Sayer in 1755, is a handbook for the amateur artist that aims to provide ‘Proper Instructions to Youth for their Entertainment and Improvement in this Art’. The core of the book is a series of ‘Many and Curious Specimens’: prints from images ‘engrav’d on one hundred copper-plates’ that present vignettes to study and copy ...”

“... For a spell during the 1960s, Robert Creeley’s ‘I Know a Man’ may have been the most often quoted, even the most widely known, short poem by a living American. Here is the poem: As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking, – John, I sd, which was not his name, the darkness sur- rounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for christ’s sake, look out where yr going ...”

“... aftermaths of soft September/Or under blanching mays.’ A year later, reviewing a life of Louis-Napoleon, he drily noted some inexact uses among ‘the daisies and dandelions of contemporary metaphor’: ‘I did not know that a storm could have an aftermath, nor that an aftermath could reach a throne.’ The unforgiving scholar and the poet who ...”

“... made evident by the rise of high-return auctions, the most infamous being the 1973 sale of the Robert and Ethel Scull collection, which centred on Pop. Enraged artists saw none of the profits (with Hirst, in this respect, there has been a complete turnabout). After the recessionary 1970s, the anti-regulatory policies of Reagan and Thatcher promoted a new ...”

“... sanctuary in music. Surgeons took pride in aprons so dirty they could have stood up on their own; Robert Liston, who pioneered the use of anaesthesia, stored his instruments up his sleeve between surgeries to keep them warm. The mortality rate among medical students – who were liable to let the knife slip – was high: the surgeon John Abernethy concluded ...”

“... Hitler – who were, in any case, only ‘arrested’ in the sense of being stopped. I proposed Louis Althusser, but was condescendingly told that an academic political theorist who strangled his wife hardly counted as famous in the terms we were using. (The first response of my tablemates was: ‘Who?’) ‘How about Fatty Arbuckle?’ someone said, but ...”

“... has been greeted with a tremendous shout of fury. ‘Universally slated’ was how Sidgwick and Jackson described its reception to me. It has been passed over for serialisation. Film rights, once assured, are now in jeopardy. Writing in the Spectator, Frances Donaldson, modestly omitting to refer to her own worthy, if rather pedestrian biography of Edward ...”