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“... is a persuasive rehabilitation; none of the chapters is without memorable insights. We learn that Frank Capra, for example, is not the populist he is supposed to be: ‘His politics are . . . a kind of middle-class noblesse oblige.’ Keaton is not a rebel or a clown but a person who discovers that ‘setting up residence in the world’ is much harder than ...”

“... and the Lille plan looked back to urban models (such as the Broadacre City concept of Frank Lloyd Wright) that also ‘imagined nothingness’. Perhaps Koolhaas sensed that the new economy of media and communications might not abet a further dissolution of the city, its final death, as architectural futurists such as Paul Virilio had forecast, but ...”

“... rugby based on kicking for three-quarters of a game suddenly throwing the ball around the field as though it were a hot potato. What they are doing is throwing away their principles, too, because if you believe in a kicking game, then adhere to that. Don’t just switch to a totally different style only because you are behind and in trouble. What sort ...”

“... sunny day when he was still on the sunny side of 50. His biographer exposes this engagingly frank first sentence as false: we are being nudged towards Brulard’s preferred self-image. Meanwhile, as our passion for unexpurgated details about our heroes intensified, another motive for autobiography emerged: the pre-emptive strike against would-be ...”

“... time for some second thoughts. Graeme Souness has written, abetted by Bob Harris, an unusually frank football book.† Formerly of the Liverpool midfield and now of Sampdoria, Souness has long been a target for the sympathies and antipathies of many thousands of people, and it shows. What he has to say will come as a surprise to connoisseurs of ghosted ...”

“... before Christ was crucified. Yeats came to O Rathaille, or to this line of his, with the help of Frank O’Connor. Introducing O’Connor’s name, John Jordan introduces a writer who won a particular fame as a translator of Irish as well as a more widely acknowledged renown as a short-story writer in English. The translator has been of extraordinary ...”

“... migration to the mode of Helliconia Spring, his first Tolkienian novel. The novelist is always frank about his ambitions. He is quite prepared to take advantage of a handy centenary to compare his work to Joyce’s, as he did in print a few weeks ago. In a recklessly chin-leading pre-publication advertisement for Helliconia Spring, entitled ‘The Making ...”

“... a proverb that made local sense – ‘better to fatten one pig than feed five’. Listen to a field hand describing Monéys’s final moments: he ‘flailed his arms and legs and made sounds like the noises a hog makes when you stick a knife into its neck’. Once the victim had been bludgeoned with the clubs that they used to stun animals, and his body ...”

“... première of The Birth of a Nation and after the respectable citizens of Cobb County lynched Leo Frank. (Stirred up by anti-semitic hysteria, an Atlanta jury wrongly convicted the Jewish pencil factory manager of molesting and murdering a white female employee.) Atlanta was the headquarters of the powerful Twenties’ Klan, which augmented the negrophobia of ...”

“... satellite of the metropolis, redeemed if at all as the birth-place of its other famous son, Frank Sinatra. Kinsey’s family were devoutly Methodist, his father an organiser of the Inter-Church Civic League, an organisation formed to monitor the closing time of saloons. No swearing, drinking, dancing or masturbation. A loner, young Alfred found some ...”

“... resources and sustainability in general. But ideals can rapidly switch around. When, in the 1930s, Frank Lloyd Wright explored the possibilities of the extended city in his Broadacre City scheme, he saw the automobile as the saviour of the common man, the route to a democratic utopia. Now, for the good of our health and the planet, we are being asked to ...”

“... setback just the same, and in war the presence of forces – living, able-bodied forces – in the field is always an asset. The statuesque figure of the KLA fighter hewn from the bones of his forebears and caked with the dust of earlier struggles is part archetype and part identikit – and mostly suspect. Yet the term ‘epic’ tells us something about the ...”

“... necessarily socialist, ‘we had better yield the floor to the only truly great performer in that field, Plato.’ This is not to say that Schumpeter did not himself have a conception of what socialism was, or see why socialists like him leant in one direction rather than another. Socialism was a reaction to capitalism, which ‘inevitably and by the very ...”

“... go and do the experiment, or get someone else to do it. Even if the issue wasn’t really in his field he still felt that until somebody had done the experiment it was silly to argue.’ Medawar was a brilliant, intuitive player in the game of science, as he was at bridge and chess – a person who seemed in all respects to be too lucky by half. One friend ...”

“... of Brazil in the latter part of the 16th century. This strand of thought is the main focus of Frank Lestringant’s book. Perhaps the best-known early exemplar of the tradition is Montaigne’s essay ‘On Cannibals’, first published in 1580 and largely based on ethnographic accounts of cannibal feasts by the Protestant Jean de Léry and the Catholic ...”