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“... In the Preface to his new book Richard Wollheim tells how he ‘evolved a way of looking at paintings which was massively time-consuming and deeply rewarding’. He looked at them for a very long time – longer than us – and then they told him what they were all about. I came to recognise that it often took the first hour or so in front of a painting for stray associations or motivated misperceptions to settle down, and it was only then, with the same amount of time or more to spend looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was ...”

“... results, I told him proudly, in the partition calculus he’d invented with his fellow Hungarian Richard Rado; I was also trying to settle a conjecture in infinite combinatorics – that there was no infinite descending sequence of countable order types. He ignored the first, questioned me about the second, thought for a few mom ents, then shrugged – which ...”

“... including Joe McCarthy and George Wallace. Not to mention more respectable types such as Richard Nixon, whose ‘Southern strategy’ offered a blueprint for mobilising white resentment over the gains of the Civil Rights movement. (That ‘respectable’ and ‘Nixon’ can be included in the same sentence illustrates how far our political standards ...”

“... Richard Florida​ has been having second thoughts. In 2002 he argued in The Rise of the Creative Class that the future of advanced economies lay not in manufacturing but in high-skilled areas of the service sector: engineering, design, fashion, media, finance, medicine and law. The industrial revolution had largely originated in cities, but in the 20th century, industry started to move away from them ...”

“... May, ‘an eclectic blend of ulysses, kilroy, icarus, neptune, ishmael, noah, jonah, columbus, and richard halliburton! So you must, in all kindness, emphasise your mortal finitude when next we meet!’ He had leave in June, and it is through Gordon’s faithful eyes that we see Plath on the cover of the first volume of the letters: blonde hair, red lipstick ...”

“... mushy liberal opposed to the pledge of allegiance, held responsible for garbage found floating in Boston harbour, and made complicit with a conspicuously black figure named Willie Horton, a convicted murderer let out of jail by the Governor on weekend passes, the better, presumably, to do his thing. This sort of hype was supposed to have duped the public. It ...”

“... pot never boils’. No one can wholly avoid hating ‘Old Daddy Franklin’, from whose Poor Richard’s Almanac these sayings come, especially if brought up to revere him in Public School, USA. Abraham Lincoln is the father of his people; George Washington, of his nation; but Benjamin Franklin – as it happens, a basically very decent man – hovers ...”

“... rue des Archives in the Marais – in the shadow of the Centre Pompidou, which he designed with Richard Rogers in the early 1970s. At RPBW Genoa, on the coast just to the west of the city, meetings happen at a round table, with no notes taken: bad ideas are encouraged, because they’ll immediately be replaced by better ones as the collective musters its ...”

“... swept up in the storms raised by these people: for example, Henri Lefebvre, Michele Bernstein, Richard Huelsenbeck, Malcolm Maclaren. Having abandoned or been abandoned by their fiery flying rolls, each of these memorialists re-entered the satanic world – denouncing (Lefebvre), slandering (Maclaren), regretting (Bernstein), or fleeing (Huelsenbeck) their ...”

“... Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, both recently deceased, and that across the river was a Boston which still called itself ‘the Athens of America’. Edward Cummings, the father, was a man of modern outlook, if only in certain respects. A sociologist who had been at Toynbee Hall as well as at the universities of Paris and Berlin, he knew about ...”

“... came to national attention when he gave the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston. He was a state senator at the time in Illinois and running for national office. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, a singularly drab and prevaricating man, had been much taken by Obama after appearing on stage with him in Chicago. Many ...”

“... It is a collection of case-material, narrated as the experiences of a fictionalised doctor in Boston. It portrays the pressures for overtreatment as manifesting themselves, not in any direct perception that that is where doctors’ interests lie, but in an attempt to deny the uncertainty that inevitably attends any treatment, and a consequent fear of ...”

“... have felt was a dead end: sexual explicitness in writing for its own sake. When Whitman visited Boston, Emerson advised him to cut out the inflammatory bits, which would make Leaves ‘not as good a book but a good book’. Whitman listened respectfully to the sympathetic old Brahmin, but felt the price was too high. ‘If I had cut sex out,’ he mused ...”

“... about its deliberate obscurity. It is the equivalent of shutting a door in its reader’s face. As Richard Sewall, her biographer, noted, ‘She enjoyed riddles, apparently enjoyed being one.’ But was she a riddle that wanted to be solved? Did she want readerly guests? Helen Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries and Lyndall Gordon’s Lives ...”

“... the favourites: Even more than the better-known The Forest Lovers I loved The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay, about King Richard the Lion-Hearted, published in 1900 ... the medieval romances I was writing at top speed on an empty stomach were meant to be in his manner. I cannot remember whether I showed any of them ...”