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“... the role of Bryan and the director kept saying: ‘More pompous, Morone. Make him more pompous.’ Michael Kazin is a fine historian who specialises in the lost causes of the left. He has written sympathetic books on the Populist movement and the 1960s. In A Godly Hero, his life of Bryan, he now draws an unexpected conclusion: defying capitalists and defending ...”

“... side, the eighteen-wheeler that destroyed the car, and from a ditch on the side of the highway a white plastic bag floating up out of the grass where the worms are working slow and blind beneath the ants that march in their single columns of grace like soldiers before they’re shipped out, before war makes them human again and scatters them across the ...”

“... She stirs up ghosts and has no hand in laying them to rest. The centre wall of samplers deploys white figures cut from black paper: the subjects are all absences. This frieze, The Sovereign Citizens’ Sesquicentennial Civil War Celebration, brings the story from the plantation into the present, even though the cast of characters look unchangingly ...”

“... UK on Sky Atlantic, was nominated for five Emmys and made much of by everyone from Lorrie Moore to Michael Bloomberg. Before this, 26-year-old Dunham had made short films, web comedy series and two movies – the best and best-known thing she’s done so far is the movie Tiny Furniture – in which she also plays women her own age, slouching towards adulthood ...”

“... which many of the people we think of as black do not, and some of the people we think of as white do. So, too, the relevant genetic information about a person is individual and familial, not racial. A person’s height, for example is determined mainly by the height of his or her actual ancestors, partly by environmental factors and not at all by the ...”

“... triumph of the cult of personality is that it can expose its emptiness without losing its magic. Michael Rogin’s brilliant collection of essays, ‘Ronald Reagan’, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology, attempts to account for and destroy this magic by restoring the two dimensions it has effaced: history and psychic interiority. The title ...”

“... This month​ marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Woodstock festival. Michael Lang, the tenacious 24-year-old who made Woodstock happen, has a habit of surfacing at Woodstock birthdays: one book to mark the tenth anniversary, another to mark the fortieth, a couple of namesake concerts and now a coffee-table volume of photos from the 1969 festival, plus brief explanatory notes ...”

“... prophetic books has recently been called into question in a way which has largely confounded Michael Foot’s purpose in writing The History of Mr Wells. It is clear that Foot first conceived his biography as a celebration of Wells’s socialism – more particularly his ‘libertarian’ socialism, which Foot takes to be healthier than the ...”

“... at ‘nation-building’ – when the term ‘English-speaking’ might have meant something in white South African society. In contemporary South Africa, however, ‘African’ and ‘Afrikaner’ dominate the debate. Both suggest a primordial attachment to the continent, fan rival nationalisms and render the phrase ‘English-speaking South ...”

“... of revisionist historians to rehabilitate the myth of Camelot on the Potomac. Almost, but not yet. Michael Beschloss’s absorbing and authoritative study of US-Soviet relations from January 1961 until Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 adds significantly to the case amassed by the demolition squad. Like many US authors, Beschloss assumes that his ...”

“... she did, over and over, till she spat like a veteran. Someone else taught her how to smoke. From Michael Jackson she learned how to grab her crotch. Are these not accomplishments, hard-won for a girl from a nice family? So often Andersen seems to miss the point. He will, persistently, describe Madonna as a transcendent beauty, when, as everyone can ...”

“... Eastwood’s relations with his orang-utang co-star; and his excursions into biography, Bird and White Hunter, Black Heart, are brave if lumbering. But what makes and keeps him a star, as actor and director, is a certain intimacy with screen violence, or with ways of representing violence. His Westerns and his cop movies are what continue to matter, and they ...”

“... some money, so does not share Lawrence’s family background. Like the gamekeeper Annable in The White Peacock, Noon has been to Cambridge and done well, but has chosen not to go on with an academic career or a life as a déclassé intellectual. Yet he is out of place, working at home. Like Aaron Sisson in Aaron’s Rod, he has a musical gift; unlike ...”

“... As I ate them, I thought of opossums and birds, and the antique Japanese prints in black and white, in which monkeys are eating persimmons in bare trees.’ To his young Cuban poet friend José Rodríguez Feo, for whom, admittedly, he played down the Puritan, he seemed not quite American (or at least not your average norteamericano): ‘To the ...”

“... sees, implying the view of everyone else: In the middle of the stage sat girls in red bodices and white skirts. One, very fat, in a white silk dress, sat apart on a low stool with a piece of green cardboard glued to the back of it. They were all singing something. When they finished their song, the girl in ...”