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“... laudatory articles on contemporary architects such as Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Philip Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller. The architects were themselves portrayed as playboys, the architectural and sexual revolutions intimately enmeshed. In Pornotopia, Beatriz Preciado writes that in 1950s issues ...”

“... says, I’m good on TV, which is what it takes. ‘Admittedly I lack the character and wisdom of Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter. But the office itself ennobles.’ Mr Vidal works mostly in Italy, to avoid the fate of stay-at-home American writers, which is alcoholism, but he’s famous just the same, and also very rich, for the American public gives him ...”

“... not a little danger in his own make-up – perhaps he wishes there was more. Aitken is sometimes frank about the great defects of Nixon’s character, but overall he wishes to exonerate him from the worst of what he’s been blamed for, including Watergate. He rightly points out that Nixon was hardly the first to play dirty: as Attorney-General, Bobby ...”

“... Is the Irish obsession with the past a mere romantic consolation, or a practical method, as Johnson has emphasised elsewhere, of prescribing change by reference to an ancient, largely fictitious ‘golden age’ – De Valera’s method of enlisting the imagery of Cathleen ni Houlihan while establishing his narrow-minded, conservative mid-20th-century ...”

“... power and cultural philanthropy, fed by oil revenues, set against backdrops provided by Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas or Jean Nouvel. Though Rykwert mentions none of these architects by name, their work plainly lies behind his guiding assumption that the ‘privatisation’ of political and financial power in modern times has led to a wave ...”

“... up to and including testing, without having a human spy to witness it and tell us about it. He is frank about the numerous instances in which the whole detection apparatus failed, as it did in the first Soviet test of August 1949; the ‘Vela’ explosion in the South Atlantic in September 1979; the detonation by India of several devices, one ...”

“... There was only one other person in the life of Samuel Johnson who stood a chance of writing a biography as entertaining as Boswell’s. Francis Barber was overqualified by modern standards, and too loyal for the job in any era, but for more than thirty years he was Johnson’s (black) manservant ...”

“... thought. ‘When I imagine the shape that will hover above the first half of the 21st century,’ Johnson begins, ‘what comes to mind is not the coiled embrace of the genome, or the etched latticework of the silicon chip.’ It is instead the images of computer programs that use the underlying logic of emergence to generate complex, and in some instances ...”

“... in the gentrified servants’ quarters of a large Georgetown estate house that December. Magic Johnson was playing for Michigan that Saturday night and I’d gambled that three successive baskets would be made by players with odd-numbered jerseys. I was ahead a few bucks when the Ohio State centre put a savage elbow into Magic’s young chin and Doc’s ...”

“... one thing certain,’ he observed, ‘is that we are too many’). A favourite rhymer was Lionel Johnson, whose obscure learning he venerated and exaggerated. He owed a good deal to Arthur Symons, and was a main attraction of Symons’s journal the Savoy. He came, in his quest for a hard-edged style, to reject the ‘decadence’, but the ‘tragic ...”

“... been no difficulty in showing that, in these memoirs as in her career, Thatcher has been neither frank nor humble. Mrs Thatcher appears to suffer from a quite advanced form of egomania, or megalomania, or both; and it is genuinely difficult for her not to see everyone else as either her opponent or an instrument of her will. The former are immediately ...”

“... a lot of undistinguished fiction. My own opinion is that his finest book is the biography of Dr Johnson (1974), a labour of love greatly admired by some professional students of the subject. A major difference between Wain and those erstwhile friends who so often put him down in their letters was that he did not share their need to pretend to hate ...”

“... Those who have tried to make sense of Frank Lloyd Wright’s own account of his life will be grateful to Brendan Gill. He relieves us of doubts about our intelligence. As you read the Autobiography much does not quite fit. The feeling grows on you, as it must on the victims of confidence tricksters, that you cannot follow the story because you are stupid ...”

“... of under the more usual trade definition of ‘metaphysical’, derived largely from Dryden and Johnson, who had in mind not Dante but Donne, Cowley, Cleveland etc. We have to take account of poetry that is metaphysical in the less specialised sense: philosophical poetry possessing the means to make us feel thought and think feeling ...”

“... her valiant attempt to bring a bohemian spirit to a corporate building. With the help of Philip Johnson, MoMA’s first architecture curator, who had recently set up his own practice, Lambert spent six weeks travelling around America interviewing the most prominent practitioners of the International Style. She divided them into three categories: those who ...”