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“... When Hal Foster uses the word ‘first’ in the title of his confidently focused study, he means to start us thinking about Pop now and then. It is a reference to Reyner Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), which argued that modernism’s prewar optimism was over and done. ‘We have already entered the Second Machine Age,’ Banham declared, ‘and can look back on the First … as a period of the past ...”

“... of Polke; this impressive show is that swing. If Rauschenberg and Johns prepared the way for Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, Polke and Richter quickly adapted American Pop, which they first encountered in magazines, to German ends. In 1963, along with Konrad Lueg (who soon metamorphosed into the gallerist Konrad Fischer), Polke and Richter claimed the ...”

“... is the brandishing of the Ten Commandments at state courthouses. (The main protagonist is Roy Moore, the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, who was dismissed after he refused to remove his granite decalogue; there are related cases in Texas and Kentucky, due to be heard by the US Supreme Court over the summer.) This act defies the separation ...”

“... their errors into anything but folly. But why is this? And who are they?They are a class, as Roy Foster says, the old Ascendancy in Ireland. Elsewhere Yeats borrows a phrase from the poem to talk about Lady Gregory, who is said to be ‘indifferent to praise or blame’, a quality attributed to the law that was one of the pretty toys ‘we’ had ...”

“... houses for news and ideas, and as vehicles for social contact and cohesion, while helping to foster regional and local identities. By promoting social affiliations, facilitating social networking and defining separate spheres, the club played a crucial part in the making of Britain’s public ...”

“... of his people in the North and agents of the elite liberalism of Dublin 4. His 1991 critique of Roy Foster on the Easter Rising, reprinted in Small World, is blisteringly effective, yet its foundations now seem shaky. ‘Foster’s own writing is itself a reading dependent on the congealed stereotype of the ...”

“... notabilities, including James Joyce and Parnell. Thirty years later, long after disowning his foster-parents and losing track of the box, he speaks of the letters to the librarian of the Celtic Library and is offered a substantial sum for them. Desperate for money he forges them, from memory. The fraud is discovered and he is about to stand trial. His one ...”

“... He was subjected to even more abuse from the British press and public than Nasser or John Foster Dulles. In a widely photographed incident, Altrincham was physically assaulted. His assailant shouted to the pressmen he had summoned to watch: ‘This is for insulting the Queen!’ The papers – except the Times, which on advice from the palace kept a ...”

“... to Gregory’s powers, and her industry, as a writer. There is inevitably a good deal about her in Roy Foster’s biography of Yeats, but it is, in all its extensive splendour, a book about Yeats, and Gregory can be no more than a secondary character. Tóibín’s is a little book, but it does keep her at its centre, and its gentleness probably reflects ...”

“... bring it on themselves, with their Barry McKenzies, their Ian Chappells, their self-parodying Foster ads, and so on. And there is the accent: for some reason more readily mimickable than any of our own regional twangs. Theories about the Australian accent are just as snooty as theories about Australia. Some say that it is a form of cell-block ...”

“... brand of banality, with divisive effects on the art world. In 1960, independently at first, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol had begun to paint cartoons and advertisements drawn from tabloid newspapers of familiar characters and generic products – Popeye and Mickey, tennis shoes and golf balls. When Lichtenstein moved on to comic strips – romance ...”

“... authoritative intellectual biography have been persuaded to contribute an epitome here – such as Roy Foster on Yeats or Ray Monk on Bertrand Russell – and some leading literary scholars have similarly written about their favourite critical subjects, such as Christopher Ricks on Tennyson or Marilyn Butler on Jane Austen. There are one or two notable ...”

“... of the Skulls – portraits of us all in effect – at the time of his death. Unlike the Pop of Roy Lichtenstein or James Rosenquist, his Pop had teeth, and a great part of its edge lay in its recognition of the deathliness of the mass image. On this score the best remark comes from Deleuze in 1969, in the middle of the Vietnam War, no doubt with Warhol in ...”

“... into modernist art, in the double sense of the common and the denigrated. A few years later Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol pushed banality further with their borrowings from cartoons and comics, and, along with Rauschenberg, Johns was soon slotted in as a transitional figure between Abstract Expressionism and Pop, an art-historical positioning that ...”

“... to The God That Failed, a 1949 book edited by the Labour MP Richard Crossman. He went on to foster a series of CIA-funded seminars, populated by Encounter contributors, in the Austrian ski resort of Alpbach.Koestler’s adventurous past in the Spanish Civil War, along with his explorations of cosmology (The Sleepwalkers) and of the Stalin purges ...”