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“... invariably linked with a group of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least likely ...”

“... Britain in the era of anti-Fascism. Broda’s protagonists do not belong in the shadowy world of John le Carré’s intelligence professionals or agents, or even the milieu of full-time Communist Party or Comintern functionaries, let alone the Party cadres trained into total identification with Moscow in institutions like the Lenin School. Their life was ...”

“... the antecedents of Webb’s Red House in the work of Butterfield and Pugin and indeed in John Nash, who might claim, if any one architect could, to have invented the architecture Muthesius so admired. But to the Edwardians Nash was still despicable as a stucco-peddling Neoclassicist, his houses ‘cheerless’ and ‘rectangular’. It was to the ...”

“... joke: ‘Muhammad Ali was Jewish’ (Chapter 2); ‘Bette Davis was Jewish’ (Chapter 3); ‘John Lennon was Jewish’ (Chapter 4); and so on. The text often blooms into a special boxed feature, such as: ‘The Joke about the Pope and the Chief Rabbi’ (this takes a whole page) or: Haggadah (Pop Quiz #1) Q. When Alex and Adam had a smoke, how much of ...”

“... structural and connected to America’s experience of war. Military success has helped to foster constitutional stasis and complacency. The UK exhibits comparable problems, but to a more pronounced degree. Like the US, but over a longer period of time, the UK has been both a markedly warlike state and generally a successful one. In the mid-17th ...”

“... not far from the President’s House, the third presidential mansion, where George Washington and John Adams lived, and a tourist destination for those who don’t leave colonial tours shaking the experience out of their heads as if in imitation of the Liberty Bell, Philly’s cracked symbol of freedom. For years, the historical society responsible for the ...”

“... abscesses beneath the old skin, hopeless and incorrigible instincts which left to themselves will foster a world of predators and carrion. Such a world can never heal itself. Hence hope lies solely with larger-scale civilisation, whatever metropolitan tolerance is still available in North America, the United Kingdom or the new Europe. Humankind’s inherent ...”

“... embodiment of international law. 2. Massive intervention on this scale in the Middle East can only foster anti-Western terrorism. Rather than helping to crush al-Qaida, it is likely to multiply recruits for it. America will be more endangered after a war with Iraq than before it. 3. The blitz in preparation is a pre-emptive strike, openly declared to be ...”

“... scandals and even portrayed as ordering the murder of the deputy White House counsel Vince Foster (who committed suicide in 1993) in order to cover up her transgressions. John Knox was surely right to label his 1558 diatribe against powerful women only The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of ...”

“... and the exotic East. A separate gallery showcases the Oscar gowns and suits of stars from Jodie Foster and Samuel Jackson to Jakob Dylan against the background of a silent video loop of American Gigolo and other Armani-designed films. Sections devoted to elaborately beaded, exquisitely embroidered and sleekly tailored garments in black and ...”

“... in its exposure of the coming land-piracy that it seemed prophetic. It was efficiently directed by John MacKenzie, but the meat of the thing is in Barrie Keeffe’s script, his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as MacKenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by a slippery ...”

“... in the freedom struggle. The four political assassinations that define the 1960s – those of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and King – stand in for the very large numbers (almost all black and lost to national public memory) martyred to racial justice. It is now a commonplace that, instead of protecting Southern civil rights workers, the FBI (with ...”

“... House of Commons in the 1640s, on which Hexter’s best work was written, though Elizabeth Read Foster analyses ‘The Journal of the House of Lords for the Long Parliament’. There is nothing on Sir Thomas More. Few of the contributors are former pupils. The five most distinguished are neither pupils nor colleagues nor even Americans. A specially ...”

“... decided to double down on Garbo by pairing her with its most bankable male star, John Gilbert, in the costume drama Flesh and the Devil (1926). She plays a femme fatale who comes between two childhood friends by marrying one of them while in love with the other. Even in the more adventurous vamp and flapper films, sex was something you did ...”

“... of the danger he was running regarding the obscenity laws and obloquy in his own social circles. John Sturrock, whose translation this is, points out in his introduction how the First World War had helped lighten persecution and, in turn, gave breathing space to Proust’s quest, not for lost time, but for revealing human complexity. Proust had very mixed-up ...”