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“... had irresistible appeal. Linking the Biblical story of the baptism of the Ethiopian by Philip the Evangelist (Acts 8.27-40) with such texts as ‘Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God’ (Psalm 68.31), they marked out an alternative tradition to the one which condemned them, as sons of Ham, to be perpetual ‘servants of ...”

“... The troubles he encountered during and after the war must of course have had earlier origins, and Martin Seymour-Smith is probably right in his diagnosis: ‘Possibly his strange and neurotic personality and its written expressions were in part a reaction against his having been deprived of both paternal influence and the Jewishness he knew he had ...”

“... passes over. A specifically Jewish vein of it, stretching from Ernst Bloch and Gustav Landauer to Martin Buber and Herman Cohen, has recently been excavated by Russell Jacoby in Picture Imperfect.* Curiously, neither Jacoby nor Jameson mentions the latest Jewish thinker to inherit this tradition, Jacques Derrida. Theodor Adorno, whom Jameson does discuss, is ...”

“... Corbusier can be discerned. It is here, too, that the links to Lutyens’s masters Norman Shaw and Philip Webb appear, not in literal borrowings but in their shared toughness of architectural approach, resolutely avoiding the norm. Who knows what Lutyens would have made of the Bank of England, Soane’s masterpiece so unerringly obliterated by Baker? The ...”

“... and Melopotamos, who had said that he was either a knave or a fool for sounding a bit like Martin Luther on justification. It is amazing that anything got done at all, and indeed more than once the whole event nearly ended in disarray. For some of the period covered by the council’s gestation and deliberations, the pope was formally at war with ...”

“... doesn’t mention that they also brought six goshawks, two horses, four falcons, ‘one living martin’ (presumably as opposed to the dead furs), one crane and – mysteriously – two pelicans. The pelicans were kept in the king’s menagerie in St James’s Park, where three years later John Evelyn ‘examined the Throate of the Onocratylus or Pelecan ...”

“... John Lennon returned his MBE as a protest against the UK’s support of the federal government. Martin Amis, then a university student, was shocked to encounter ‘an incredible reactionary … who supports Nigeria against Biafra’; the same person, it turned out, supported the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.Even the British understood that there was ...”

“... grumps – McCarthy to Edmund Wilson, who locked her in a room to force her to write, Sontag to Philip Rieff, the sociologist she met as a student at 17 and with whom she later co-authored Freud: The Mind of the Moralist – and Sontag took over McCarthy’s old lemonade stand as Partisan Review’s theatre reviewer. Lines of succession make for neat ...”

“... comes not from anti-clericalism but from piety: he goes to Mass at peril of his life, but in Martin Parker’s 1632 ballad, ‘A True Tale of Robin Hood’, his post-Reformation fervour leads him occasionally to castrate clergymen. His loyalty goes straight to the top; his enemy is the corrupt middle man. In order to maintain Robin as the hero of ...”

“... male) behaviour. But where baseball is all form, the Western is heavy on content. Essentially, as Philip French once observed, it is ‘America rewriting and reinterpreting her own past, however honestly or dishonestly’. As is the literary history of Westerns: Henry Nash Smith’s classic Virgin Land is redolent of New Deal optimism, Robert Warshow’s much ...”

“... is particularly revealing about Wright’s knowledge of the work of his European contemporaries. Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s catalogue of the 1932 exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art, famous for introducing the term ‘International Style’, assumed, in Johnson’s phrase, that Wright was ‘the greatest American architect of ...”

“... with train tunnels and trains coming through them), horse-riders, deer and madonnas. Estate of Martin Ramírez The critical milestone to which I refer was an exhilarating, even rhapsodic review of the 2007 exhibition of his work at the American Folk Art Museum, in which Roberta Smith, senior art critic at the New York Times, declared Ramírez ‘one of ...”

“... and nipped in there. Halfway down the corridor, I was looking for a john and who do I see but Philip Roth. “Hey, Philip, what you doin’ here?” “Oh, I had to pee,” Roth said. “Happens to me all the time,” I said. “You just have to pee.” The previous week I went to see my daughter in Brooklyn and I ...”

“... sequence of letters between a farmhand, Emily Chitticks, and her sweetheart, Private Will Martin; five of the 23 letters she wrote were returned, inscribed KILLED. In one, she told him: ‘I have dreamt that you were back home with me dear and the most strange thing about them, you are always in civilian clothes when I dream of you & and I have never ...”

“... into the commonest crevasse in Irish family life – the priesthood’. Later, Brennan wrote about Martin and Delia Bagot, whose daughters are based on Maeve and her younger sister. To read The Springs of Affection is to allow 48 Cherryfield Avenue to become part of your mind: the narrow staircase with its wine-red runner, the panel of brass around the ...”