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“... symbols and symptoms of the decline, the sudden physical shrinking of American newspapers. The Washington Post was once a behemoth, so big it could be physically hard to get to grips with. Now it feels like a freesheet. The Sunday edition of the New York Times was famous for being so heavy that paperboys would lob it onto the porch and accidentally kill ...”

“... campaigner and local Labour Party member, read some of her poems, including a rumbustious reply to John Betjeman which she called ‘In Praise of Slough’ – ‘those bombs aren’t such a huge joke any more.’ The main session over, we were offered Judith Chernaik on Shelley’s feminism or Elma Dangerfield on Byron and Shelley or Marilyn Butler on the ...”

“... British Government’s promise to establish a ‘national home’ for the Jews in Palestine. The Washington Naval Treaty of 1921 was negotiated by Balfour, and although he never displayed an interest in social reform he greatly encouraged state expenditure on scientific and medical research. Balfour was at the very least an eminent and interesting busybody ...”

“... got Kenner to drive him (he didn’t drive) to visit Ezra Pound in St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington DC, where he’d been incarcerated in 1945, having pleaded insanity to avoid a treason charge for the seditious radio talks he delivered in Italy during the war. He remained at St Elizabeth’s for 12 years. The old man McLuhan and Kenner saw there ...”

“... battlefield as imagined in Swarming and the Future of Conflict (2000) by the RAND Corporation’s John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt. Technology, Arquilla and Ronfeldt argue, will soon make it possible for small clusters of loosely organised military units to conduct brief and co-ordinated strikes, then disperse. Message boards, similarly, allow lone hackers to ...”

“... at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City (114 dead). The Brooklyn Bridge stands today because John Roebling designed it to be six times stronger than it needed to be. So when Washington Roebling discovered, after his father’s death, that an unscrupulous supplier had introduced substandard wire into the cables, it was ...”

“... for the CIA’s Polish operations at the time, is unimpressed.) Walesa has the air of a Polish John Prescott, only bigger. He has not carried the last 25 years as well as the other Poles. What is even stranger, I find myself in an assembly of political ghosts. Leaving aside the Chinese, who avoid public discussions, a surprising number of those who made ...”

“... on the down escalator at nine o’clock in the morning. When the Number 30 passed a statue of John F. Kennedy in Marylebone Road, a teenager looked up at his mother. ‘It all started with him,’ he said. ‘I know what you mean,’ his mother said. ‘He was the first to get this amount of coverage.’ In Regent’s Park rows of old ladies were sitting ...”

“... on their way to becoming a distinct American people has a good pedigree, including J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, the source of all but one of Butler’s epigraphs. Crèvecoeur’s famous question was: ‘What then is this new man the American?’ His immediate answer – ‘that strange mixture of blood, which you ...”

“... Kleinzahler was born in 1949 and grew up in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across from the George Washington Bridge. He went to college in Wisconsin, but dropped out and drifted a while, before enrolling at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where his favourite 20th-century poet, Basil Bunting, happened to be teaching that year. Afterwards he ...”

“... Paris, ‘Are you an Englishman?’ and received the reply: ‘Thank God I am, Sir.’ He quotes Washington Irving’s wonderful description of the English traveller in Italy who had his servant prepare and serve his meals in his carriage: beefsteak, ‘ketchup and soy, and Cayenne pepper, and Harvey sauce, and a bottle of port wine, from that warehouse the ...”

“... wanted 370 miles, the House roughly double. The New York Times was quick to play to the mood in Washington and proposed a troubling parlour game, inviting a handful of architects to design the Congressional project as a neighbourly fence that made the most of its unattractive character, often by pretending it had nothing to do with exclusion. The fence, the ...”

“... to give them the credit of motive that the 27-year-old Cline gives her fictionalised renditions. John Waters dedicated Pink Flamingos to the Manson girls, lampooning the nation’s celebrity obsession with them. In Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon’s novel about the aftermath of the 1960s, Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello asks his girlfriend if she’ll wear a wig ...”

“... is addressed to Rufus, the protagonist of James Baldwin’s novel. Brown follows him to the George Washington Bridge, where he eventually jumps to his death (or freedom): ‘and you leap/Dirty against the whiteness/Of the sky to your escape/Through the whiteness//Of the water.’ Whiteness is all-encompassing: it requires a leap into space – to the stars in ...”

“... a redistricting map that sews up the outcome of a congressional election. In 2019, Chief Justice John Roberts declared that although the Supreme Court ‘does not condone excessive partisan gerrymandering’, any court-mandated intervention in district maps would inevitably look partisan and impugn the court’s neutrality. In 2017, during arguments in a ...”