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“... of Superman and Batman’s deep whiteness that establishes Spider-Man’s metaphoric blackness. Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne live in palaces of privilege and operate from fantasy cities, Metropolis and Gotham, while working-class Spider-Man is a bridge-and-tunnel person, from Queens, in the real New York. Spider-Man’s good intentions get misrepresented in ...”

“... detail plain.4 March. I am rereading (or reading properly) James Stourton’s book on Kenneth Clark. I hadn’t realised how apposite for these days is Yeats’s quite hackneyed ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/ … The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate ...”

“... more revealingly shows the untidiness and uncertainties of a popular upheaval.At the heart of Jonathan Beecher’s Writers and Revolution is a simple but powerful idea: to follow nine contemporary intellectuals – d’Agoult, the novelists George Sand, Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert, the statesman Lamartine, the liberal theorist and parliamentarian ...”

“... close up can we see how perilous and uncertain many of the steps he took appeared at the time. As Jonathan Steinberg shows in this superb biography, there was nothing preordained about Bismarck’s successes. Had the war with Denmark not revived his fortunes he might well have disappeared from Prussian and German politics for ever after the 1862 ...”

“... taste. The dismantling of Greenberg’s authority reached its height during his debate with T.J. Clark at the ‘Modernism and Modernity’ conference. ‘I really do say this with respect,’ Clark said, summarising his objections. ‘You have become a spokesman for a kind of devastating self-satisfaction and ...”

“... parts of the empire, whose men were enlisted in the struggle by Britain. I wouldn’t go as far as Jonathan Jones in the Guardian, who called the poppy installation ‘a Ukip style memorial’. But he has a point. I wonder whether next year we will remember that we wouldn’t have ‘won’ the Battle of Waterloo without General Blücher and his Prussians. The ...”

“... on their rucksacks as they criss-crossed Europe meeting up with pen pals and old army buddies. Jonathan Purkis, a self-described ‘vagabond sociologist’, sees hitchhiking as the inheritor of a long tradition celebrating self-sufficient travel, dating back to Lao Tzu’s aphorisms (the journey as more important than the destination) and medieval ...”

“... Emboldened by the resurgent Marxism and feminism of the 1960s, engaged scholars including T.J. Clark, Thomas Crow, Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock asked difficult questions about class, audience, gender and sexuality, questions that were soon rumbling through other fields as well. Yet disruptive though these inquiries were, they mostly continued to ...”

“... waged against William Rogers, Nixon’s Secretary of State, is now being waged by William Clark, Reagan’s special assistant for National Security Affairs, against George Shultz, the present Secretary of State. Hersh seems to me to have got it exactly the wrong way round when he writes: ‘ever the apt pupil, Haig had learned well how to manipulate ...”

“... too complex for unilinear prediction. A germane point is well developed in a later essay by J.C.D. Clark, who seizes on the tension between sound arguments for contingency and a misguided development of far-reaching counterfactul examples of alternative futures: ‘The counterfactual assumes clearly identifiable alternative paths of development, whose ...”

“... interviewer as well, with a varied roster of guests including the directors Walter Hill and Larry Clark, the actresses Anne Heche and Illeana Douglas, and the uncontainable Kanye West. His conversations with fellow novelists and screenwriters are among the best I’ve heard, insider sessions of literary shoptalk that discuss the mechanics of the trade instead ...”

“... Mervyn Peake, living on ‘this desperate edge of now’, or the mercurial evanescence of a Jim Clark or a Joe Orton, counts for little in the scales of achievement when weighed against such elephantine stamina and titanic endurance. This book is, unashamedly, perhaps inevitably, a monument to the loneliness of the long-distance runner, rather than a paean ...”

“... credit, Mullin recognises the tackiness of this fixing operation, and confronts Blair’s adviser Jonathan Powell, who blithely admits that ‘we fucked up . . . but we couldn’t allow a bozo like Livingstone to win.’ Less calculating politicians than the People’s Ken may feel more double-minded about power, turning their energies to policy areas which ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... to this case has been “Just another death, just another murder in Blackpool,” ’ said Jonathan Brown, news editor of the Gazette. ‘I’m afraid it’s a very common phenomenon here.’ Young people turn up at the start of the season looking for work, just as Christopher had done, and are left high and dry when the tourist trade ebbs away in ...”