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“... MoMA has grown from a discreet cluster of salons into an institutional colossus that occupies most of its block. The American Folk Art Museum fell in its march west to Sixth Avenue, and only Saint Thomas Church has blocked its access east to Fifth.MoMA has added 47,000 square feet of exhibition space, a 30 per cent increase for a new total of 165,000 ...”

“... eye, given where things were headed, is that his mother, Emily, played the cello. Russell was no Glenn Gould-style prodigy, but he does seem to have wilfully set his own course from very early on. ‘He was ahead of his age in the things he cared about,’ according to his sister Kate, ‘and that led to all kinds of trouble academically and ...”

“... 52 Republican planes. The Condor Legion played a key role in many Nationalist victories, but its most notorious action was the bombing, carried out with the Italians, of the Basque town of Guernica on 26 April 1937. Twenty-two tons of incendiaries and explosives were dropped on the town, killing several hundred people. The Nationalist forces, still some ...”

“... the pre-eminent contest in world cricket, and that Anglo-Australian rivalry is still one of the most significant in all sport. But it is not true, and it hasn’t been true for some time. The rivalry in international cricket that counts at present is the one between Australia and India. If this were geopolitics, then Australia would be the United ...”

“... of the later list (for example, LA Confidential, The Usual Suspects, Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould), and a few others (Nil by Mouth, The English Patient, The Truman Show, Shallow Grave) that someone might feel it was worth crossing the road for; but in general his argument that Lane’s evident talent has had little to work on and is condemned to ...”

“... to foil it. This is too deterministic by half, but his thinking is more nuanced when he considers Glenn Gould. On the one hand, he sees Gould as the ultimate performer; on the other, Gould famously withdrew into the recording studio. Yet in doing so, the dying man implies, Gould was so given over to technological manipulation that he overcame the opposition ...”

“... the body of a greyhound for beauty’. In one of his notebooks is a list of ‘the world’s most beautiful phenomena’ which includes greyhounds, as well as Ida Rubinstein’s legs and ‘the form and structure of my highly polished cranium’. At the Brescia Air Show in September 1909 – six years after the Wright Brothers’ first lift-off ...”

“... 1958,’ Steinberg wrote in ‘Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art’ (1962), still the most influential essay on the artist, ‘have these points in common’:1. Whether objects or signs, they are man-made things.2. All are commonplaces of our environment.3. All possess a ritual or conventional shape, not to be altered.4. They are either whole ...”

“... by the NSA and its friends. But, as Luke Harding discloses in his book on the Snowden affair, the most viewed story in the Guardian’s history wasn’t any of this: it wasn’t a piece of news at all. It was the 12-minute video, made by Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, in which Snowden explained who he was and why he’d ...”

“... vein of male introspection that would soon be called the Actors Studio style, or the Method. Most of this was humbug, and Mann is good at bursting the Method balloon. Kazan had been a co-founder of the Actors Studio (in 1947), but he soon backed away from it, leaving it as the fiefdom of Lee Strasberg. Stella Adler (who had been to Russia to study with ...”

“... the edges of our neighbourhood waiting for a lapse of parental oversight to spirit us away. In the most innocent of enterprises, he saw a danger. In every football game he saw the ruptured spleen, the death by drowning in every backyard pool, leukaemia in every bruise, broken necks on trampolines, the deadly pox or fever in every rash or bug bite. It was, of ...”

“... beckoning me into a too sudden intimacy. There is a sensuousness in Mozart’s music which I feel most directly when I try and play it on the piano. The music is extremely tactile, its touchingness embodied in touch, its feelings felt in the fingers. The passage work in the recapitulation of the first movement of the A minor Piano Sonata (K.410), for ...”

“... Office, the State Department, the Air Combat Command and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Most important, Richelson is a senior fellow at the National Security Archive in Washington, the pre-eminent American organisation researching the Cold War and US foreign policy, whose work is based primarily on an aggressive use of the FOIA. The National ...”

“... the way to Iran. In contrast to its fortified Baghdad namesake, the Helmand Green Zone is where most of the fighting takes place. Its irrigation ditches, hedgerows and walled compounds allow the Taliban to fight a classic guerrilla war that can seem very similar to the one fought by the Vietcong, complete with a complex network of trenches, tunnels, traps ...”

“... or less exactly as much as I thought I was going to. And perhaps the underlying thing I missed most was the sheer lightness of pre-Covid choice: the airiness, the impermanence, the lack of consequence of opting for a coffee at this café rather than that, lamb for dinner because we had chicken yesterday, getting the new Ian Rankin because I saw it in the ...”