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“... when I first studied American literature in the late Fifties. There were books by black writers, Washington, Douglass, Du Bois and so on, but they came from another, very regrettable area of American experience – slavery – and thus were in some unspecified way apart from the literary mainstream.) Fishkin renews the claim that ‘Mark Twain helped open ...”

“... her to West Germany. She takes as her motif the startling quotation from the Revelations of St John: ‘And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the ...”

“... 20 May, is the date of Kent’s arrest. Where else does he slip up? He mentions that Knight and John le Carré knew one another, but doesn’t see fit to add that le Carré – under his real name, David Cornwell – illustrated one or two of Knight’s post-war publications (e.g. Talking Birds, 1961): a not uninteresting detail in a story that includes ...”

“... Hersh wrote, ‘By the summer of 1970, the secret life of Henry Kissinger was known throughout the Washington press corps,’ I sat up hopefully in bed, but no, he meant Kissinger’s secret professional life as ‘the senior White House official’ who briefed reporters and gave off-the-record interviews. Mr Hersh does not even allow himself to speculate ...”

“... fresh nation ... with one more possession of beauty’. The translator, therefore, can resemble a Washington or a Jefferson as much as a traditional monarch, and like Aeneas he plants the old gods in a new place and a new language. The Virgilian theme and the language question are subtly explored in Brian Friel’s Translations, a play that was first ...”

“... to Stockbridge ‘after the Revolution’, and who was a friend of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington. His descendants (but not, importantly, all of them) are buried, in ‘the Pie’, with their heads facing out and their feet pointing in, towards their ancestor. The legend is, apparently, that on Judgment Day the Sedgwicks will arise together, en ...”

“... to understand what experis in other fields are saying. A few weeks earlier, the editor of Nature, John Maddox, reported on a conference about scientific journals and electronic publishing. Now that electronic mail (email) allows instant publication, printed journals carry a time penalty. Moreover, as email contributions and commentary appear side by side they ...”

“... Duomo; and the windswept David, painted on a leather shield now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In a lost Assumption of the Virgin, it is said, he portrayed himself as Judas. There is no doubting Andrea’s impact among his contemporaries: a challenging figure with a faintly lurid reputation. But was he also a murderer? According to the early ...”

“... over to the monks of Ampleforth to be crammed, successfully, for a history scholarship to Oxford. John Peet ended up as head of the Reuters bureau in Berlin, before defecting to the East in 1950. Gavin Ewart, whose poems now seem the high-spot of Out of Bounds, went to Cambridge with an exhibition to read classics; he left Wellington with some farewell verses ...”

“... a ‘hero image of Castro, in which all the virtues of Robin Hood and Thomas Jefferson, of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, were contained in a single man’. Matthews’s series caused an uproar in Cuba: Batista himself was enraged by it, and one of his top advisers dismissed Matthews’s reporting as ‘a chapter in a fantastic ...”

“... and its mortifying consequences: arrest, imprisonment in the DTC in Pisa, and then, back in Washington, psychiatric examination, and transfer to St Elizabeth’s Federal Hospital for the Insane. In 1957, Forrest Read put forward the view that the movement within the Pisan Cantos from hell through purgatory to a glimpse of paradise recapitulated a ...”

“... his first book, from 1958, and republished it in 2001, with an introduction by his friend John Ashbery.* Schuyler is first and last a poet, but the other books shed interesting light on the poetry. ‘For readers of his poetry, the idea of the Diary of James Schuyler might almost seem like too much of a good thing,’ begins Nathan Kernan’s ...”

“... who early in his career restaged great watery history paintings – The Raft of the ‘Medusa’, Washington Crossing the Delaware – as surfing scenes, has long been picking California’s allegorical crops. A Southern California surfer himself, he once painted a brilliant series – In Smog and Thunder: Historical Works from the Great War of the ...”

“... exists in two versions, one now in the Whitney Museum, the other in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The photograph also survives, guarding its own pathos and dim beauty. All three show him as a boy with smooth hair and a neat coat, holding a small bouquet in well-articulated fingers. He is standing next to his seated mother, who wears an enveloping ...”

“... of fashionable life. He thrilled at an expedition to view the huge painting by Emanuel Leutze of Washington crossing the Delaware, his excitement in the ‘wondrous flare of projected gaslight’ all the greater for his awareness that it would otherwise be the hour for bed. At home there was the large painting of Florence by Thomas Cole that covered half a ...”