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“... was unacceptable: ‘Among a free people the very proposal would be rejected with abhorrence.’ Robert Peel ignored this advice and set up the Metropolitan Police in 1829. In 1833, a meeting was called at Coldbath Fields near Gray’s Inn Road by the National Union of the Working Classes to object to the new police force and call for the extension of the ...”

“... artist and consumptive cannot afford to get too involved with life.’ He continues: D.H. Lawrence, fellow artist and consumptive, would have acrimoniously disagreed with him. Malice and revenge were a natural tonic and inspiration to Lawrence, although some of his best stories, particularly the early ones, have a ...”

“... for us squeamish art-lovers to accept, but much less potent. Speaking of trapdoors and false fire, Lawrence Lipking regrets that Mozart should have ‘spent his genius on an outmoded moral relic, thrilling but not serious’, yet old myths are serious, and they die hard. To get his Faust off the hook, it took Goethe something like a verbal quibble, and then ...”

“... familiar with only three: Fernand Braudel has been my mentor for more than quarter of a century; Lawrence Stone guided my first steps into the maze of Anglo-American historiography; Christopher Hill accompanied, a long time ago now, the infant squawks of my early Marxism, which today is much eroded. Though if I still preserve some traces of my belief in that ...”

“... absurd. His book is a joy to read, and stimulating beyond all expectation. Its account of T.E. Lawrence (only a colonel, but a general to the Arabs) is the finest brief investigation of that tortured soul I have come across. Richardson eschews the Deraa sodomy theory (in which Lawrence is thought by some to have been ...”

“... Ian Hamilton came to biography late and triumphantly with his life of the dead but still warm Robert Lowell. Riding high, he went on to attempt an unauthorised life of the aged but very much alive J.D. Salinger and was comprehensively outfoxed by the second most reclusive man in American letters. Hamilton wrote up his experience as a rueful memoir, In ...”

“... to the members of his cabinet. (‘Pablo’ for the hapless Paul O’Neill; ‘Z-Man’ for Robert Zoellick.) George Washington, on the other hand, was so aloof that even his contemporaries tried to make light of the fact. According to one story, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Alexander Hamilton dared his fellow delegate ...”

“... in Louisiana, whom they haven’t even contacted. Such fictional niceties did not trouble D.H. Lawrence, who in a passionate essay of 1923 insisted that the Leatherstocking series (the five novels that feature Natty Bumppo) were the first vital embodiment of the new consciousness underpinning American culture. In Natty, ...”

“... the Road’ (original typescript, 1951) Jack Kerouac, ‘The Slouch Hat’ (c.1960) John Cohen, ‘Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, Gregory Corso’ (1959) Wallace Berman, Untitled (Allen Ginsberg, c.1960)PreviousNext These names belong to the original small group of friends who met in New York in the early 1940s. Within ten years Ginsberg had moved to San ...”

“... When Robert Stone’s best-known novel, Dog Soldiers, was published in 1974, there was a small but significant overlap of material with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s souped-up, superheated journalistic account of the beginnings of the counterculture, published six years earlier. The coincidence of material was in many ways inevitable ...”

“... clothes. The gap, between those willing to take risks and those unwilling to look fools, widens. Lawrence Weschler’s life of the Californian artist Robert Irwin is the best description I know of why spending months deciding how to put two orange lines on an orange square, or why offering a strip of black tape round the ...”

“... An easy moralism animates this worldview. Picasso was a pig; Edmund Gosse was ‘a bore’; D.H. Lawrence hit Frieda and wanted to exterm-inate whole races; Virginia Woolf was a pretentious snob who said horrible things about the plebeian Joyce, and about the girls who worked at Woolworths; James Kelman acted like a barbarian at the Booker dinner, and so ...”

“... was devoted to East-West relations. At its first session a musty-looking gentleman called Sir John Lawrence proposed that we begin from the assumption that the decline of the Soviet economic system had passed the point of no-return. Any policy recommendations must therefore reckon with the consequences of its collapse within the next few years and the ...”

“... Unfortunately, the few Arabs consulted by the Inquiry – such as Emir Faisal, friend of T.E. Lawrence and future king of Iraq – reinforced this assessment, inaugurating the role of ‘native informant’ that other Arab leaders would fill for the Western powers in the years to come.A similar dynamic operated during the Second World War, when the US ...”

“... connections between, say, a Bolivian dance mask and a wooden pillow from Zimbabwe unimportant.In Robert Smirke’s King’s Library of 1828, now divested of the books it was built to house, there is a new gallery called ‘Enlightenment’.* On the shelves and in display cases you find a stuffed toucan, a Chinese brush pot, an engraving of Stonehenge, three ...”