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“... lay in a knowledge of the counting board, or ‘reckoning cloth’, chequered with black and white squares – the origin of the name for the royal ‘Exchequer’. Clerks pushed metal counters across the grid to represent quantities. Made from brass, copper or lead, the counters were mass-produced in Tournai and Nuremberg through the 16th century, made ...”

“... the blandest of experts at suggesting but never revealing his own private life, the English writer Edmund Gosse enthused on the resemblance of the aged Walt Whitman to ‘a great old Angora Tom’. The marvellous old poet, with his soft white hair and snowy silken ruff of beard, would have been delighted by the ...”

“... the only political act in his life was his attendance at President Johnson’s much-boycotted White House banquet for writers and intellectuals, and even then he doesn’t seem to have reflected on what he was doing. One of the surprising things in Mary McCarthy, Carol Gelderman’s new biography, is just how adventitious and chancey the lifelong ...”

“... prizewinner in the 1937 Paris International Exhibition. In one of the catalogue essays the potter Edmund de Waal sets her in the Viennese context. Her career began there at a moment of flux, somewhere towards the end of the Wiener Werkstätte and the beginning of Modernism. It was this crux, de Waal suggests, that made it possible for Rie to define herself by ...”

“... side by side. Among the passengers on the Pearl River is the eccentric old scholar Mr Jackson, an Edmund Backhouse-like figure, obsessed with prolonging his life by means of Taoist sexual techniques. To this end he has adopted Lily, a foundling picked up outside the walls of Suchow, and trained her in erotic exercises. But his little plum blossom must stay ...”

“... degraded slave.Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in Maryland in 1818, to a white man (probably a slaveholder) and an enslaved woman, Harriet Bailey. As he put it in his 1845 memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, his mother, ‘like many other slave women, had many children, but NO FAMILY’. Hired out to a plantation 12 ...”

“... of course, its proceedings lacking witnesses, its outcome predetermined. That Trump remains in the White House reminds us that there is almost no way of unseating an American president, even one manifestly unfit for office. Apart from a cumbersome process outlined in the constitution’s 25th Amendment, whereby the vice president and a majority of the cabinet ...”

“... elicited accusations of downright plagiarism from Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote indignantly to Edmund Wilson: I’d like to put you on to something about Steinbeck. He is a rather cagey cribber. Most of us begin as imitators but it is something else for a man of his years and reputation to steal a whole scene as he did in Mice and Men. I’m sending you a ...”

“... to olfactory life: soup buns full of crab meat and pork, drunken shrimp, radish-shred cakes, white jade tofu with spring onion and sesame oil. But the tea houses and dumpling vendors beloved by city workers are about to disappear as the restaurant system – once subsidised by the government – falls prey to high rents and the capitalist bottom ...”

“... an infantry officer in superbly-cut uniform, stationed between the pile of his discarded top hat, white waistcoat and silver-topped cane and a mighty shell-burst labelled ‘WAR’. Again, one of the mushroom-growths of the war was ‘Reconstruction’. Asquith appointed a small Reconstruction Committee, and Lloyd George enlarged it into an entire ...”

“... You are pulled into Serra’s reality, into a physical experience of the thing in itself. In Edmund Burke’s definition of the Sublime, ‘the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.’ When you get up close to these drawings, they create just such an ...”

“... to come out with the heartless nonsense whose purpose in the end is to serve power. Of Theodore White, the famous chronicler of American Presidents whose death occasioned reams of adulatory prose, Cockburn says that his contribution to the grotesque cult of Reagan was central, and consisted of preparing the public with pious cant about ‘abundance and ...”

“... a branded PVC sports holdall from Adidas, Gola or Puma, might just as well have dressed him ‘in white ankle socks and Mary Janes’, as if that particular combination was the most shame-saturated thing that could be imagined. The disturbingly mixed signals are neutralised to some extent by explanatory psychodrama. He gives his female persona a name ...”

“... prosperous, middle-aged English Man of Letters, someone who might have written the works of, say, Edmund Gosse, or Walter Besant. But a career is not a life. There was another private story in those earlier years – of a failed marriage and an unhappy wife, of childlessness and estrangement and despair. That story scarcely enters the letters, because Hardy ...”

“... in the music, though its greatest champion once signed a letter of protest in New Masses with Edmund Wilson, Meyer Schapiro and the Trillings, whom it if difficult to envisage tapping their feet to Count Basie.) The contribution of the Left was not only to discover talent, though nobody else took a serious interest in obscure – and, more ...”