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“... perhaps the most widely read book on the subject, What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004), Thomas Frank argued that the upheavals of the 1960s generated fears and resentments that allowed issues such as abortion rights and racial equity to eclipse economics. Cowie’s book is both an ambitious history lesson and a contribution to this ongoing ...”

“... late 20th century. And some of his most characteristic tropes found distinguished copyists: Philip Johnson, for example, created an extraordinarily Soanean New York synagogue in the 1950s, and referred disarmingly to ‘the most cuddly, marvellous feeling’ of imitating Soane. Even more strikingly, Soane has been conscripted into the genealogy of modern ...”

“... is, the world’s most sheerly entertaining tragedy, the cleverest, perhaps even the funniest. Dr Johnson meant this when he gave it ‘the praise of variety’, adding: ‘The pretended madness of Hamlet causes much mirth.’ Yet even Johnson had something like ‘problems’ with the play: he was too honest not to mention ...”

“... in the dismemberment of Bosnia. Memorable example: Brezhnev’s intimate consultation with Lyndon Johnson in the days before the invasion of Czechoslovakia.)The Cold War was ostensibly ‘about’ some quite important differences, arising from the post-war Stalinisation of Eastern Europe and from the competition for nuclear superiority. But it also had ...”

“... Wordsworth, a poet superbly ensconced in ‘the dread watch-tower of man’s absolute self’. As Frank Kermode argued in Romantic Image (1957), it is really not so large a step from the solitary tower of the Wordsworthian ego to the lonely tower of high aestheticism; and while it would never have crossed Coleridge’s mind to say with Mallarmé that the ...”

“... and this is a Clint ‘pre-empurpled’ by ‘Potentium’ (i.e. Viagra). He has tried every Johnson-enlarger advertised in his inbox, to no avail: Clint Smoker, we’re told again and again, has a fantastically tiny cock. Women scorn Clint and Clint scorns women, writing misogynist rants under the byline ‘Yellow Dog’. Friendless, he tries to make do ...”

“... private interests’ at the University of California. ‘Up Rising, Passages 25’ watches Lyndon Johnson ‘join the great simulacra of men,/Hitler and Stalin, to work his fame/with planes roaring out from Guam over Asia.’ The anti-war poems in Bending the Bow cost Duncan a publishing contract with Scribner, and by the time New Directions put out the ...”

“... Anthology had seen off the rival Oxford Anthology, produced by heavyweight academics including Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom, and the deep histories of English and British culture were being re-scripted. A revised edition of the Norton Anthology commissioned a translation of Beowulf from Heaney, and David Damrosch’s Longman Anthology of British ...”

“... main norm Page upholds within the play, though, is the surely unobjectionable one that his friend Frank Ford should not indulge a paranoid, tyrannous and unfounded jealousy over his wife, Alice. (He may be prosaic in and of himself, but if only Othello or Leontes had spent more time with decent fellows like George!) Tudeau-Clayton is surprisingly ...”

“... out, we believe, by Lieutenant-Colonel Derek Wilford on lines of thinking propounded by Brigadier Frank Kitson, British Army counter-insurgency expert – was based on the military principle that the way to bring your enemy to battle is to attack something that, for prestige reasons, he will have to defend: the Germans attacking Verdun in the First World War ...”

“... wrote to Gilbert Murray – in that British tradition of biting melancholy that runs at least from Johnson to Larkin – ‘the state of mankind always had been and always would be a state of just tolerable discomfort,’ there was some comfort, and some justness, in that kind of truthfulness. Even if perfectionism was covert religion, trying to get things ...”

“... the Thames. Waldorf and Nancy hosted epic house parties there, welcoming, among others, Shaw, Amy Johnson, Roosevelt (F.D.), Henry Ford, Asquith, Charlie Chaplin, J.M. Barrie, Churchill, Henry James, Edith Wharton, kings and queens and Mahatma Gandhi. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand spent a weekend there not long before his assassination. By the 1930s, the guest ...”

“... dogs; once the hounds have ripped them apart, their market value is decreased. Hannah’s novel is frank about the sexual abuse of black women, which reinforces the South’s ‘domestic institution’ by breeding more slaves, and in addition poisons the marriages of the whites. She describes how white mistresses and black maids grow close to each other ...”

“... no women were employed in astronomy, or any other science, elsewhere. (An excellent book by George Johnson focuses on one of those women, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, the under-acknowledged astronomer who deduced a way to measure distances in space.) Writing about a group of people is tricky – it is easier for a reader to connect to the story of an ...”

“... him to the work of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell, Cy Twombly and Ray Johnson.Opinion is divided about his appearance. ‘He thought of himself as ugly,’ a boyfriend from the early 1960s said. ‘But when you saw Andy naked, he looked like a beautiful boy.’ Another lover from the same period describes him as ‘almost repulsive ...”