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“... conceptual baggage of authenticity, spontaneity and risk that accompanied [the] ideology of the mark’ – what Clement Greenberg called ‘the Tenth Street touch’ – ‘had become a kind of creed.’* Worse, in Yve-Alain Bois’s assessment in that book, de Kooning is the exponent of a reactionary adaptation of his friend and rival ...”

“... the Americans were there only to listen – to find out what the British had really done. Carson Mark, a Canadian member of the British mission to Los Alamos who stayed on after the war and became head of the theoretical division, told us that a US general was present to ensure that no American physicist spoke out of turn. The British made a presentation and ...”

“... has been greeted with a tremendous shout of fury. ‘Universally slated’ was how Sidgwick and Jackson described its reception to me. It has been passed over for serialisation. Film rights, once assured, are now in jeopardy. Writing in the Spectator, Frances Donaldson, modestly omitting to refer to her own worthy, if rather pedestrian biography of Edward ...”

“... not the case in the past, it also requires a capacity for counter-factual imagination, which is a mark of our freedom. ‘Hence, when we talk about lying, and especially lying among acting men, let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness. Moral outrage, for this reason alone, is not likely to make it ...”

“... he was about twelve or thirteen he walked into his parents’ bedroom in the half-house on Jackson Road not expecting his father to be there, and the old man was standing in front of his bureau in just socks and an undershirt, innocently fishing in a drawer for his undershorts, that boxer style that always looked sad and dreary to Harry anyway, and ...”

“... called Chelsea Girl. Along with songs written by the likes of Reed, Cale, Sterling Morrison and Jackson Browne, she also recorded a version of Dylan’s ‘I’ll Keep It with Mine’, which she said he wrote for her (although he did not like her singing along). It’s an awkward fit. Neither she nor the song can adapt to the other. Nico hated the album’s ...”

“... He had a wedding ring, and so, barring any recent tragedies, there was a spouse who had seen this mark as recently as this morning. I imagined her (you may think me presumptuous to assume that his spouse was a woman, given my own particular circumstances, but there was something in his demeanour that suggested to me that he had never touched a man without ...”

“... House of Adams’ is ‘buried’ and ‘beyond recovery’. History in the guise of Andrew Jackson and U.S. Grant had seen to that. Ancestral traits presaged the family’s decline. The Adamses had good reason to think well of themselves (they had ‘held in succession every position of dignity and power their nation could give’), but they were a ...”

“... wife Alice, in America. During this grim time he consulted a pioneer Freudian analyst, James Jackson Putnam, in Boston and obtained some benefit. However, in writing to Putnam the following year to announce himself as definitively cured, he explained his cure in terms of the homeliest old-fashioned self-help. The ‘real clue to the labyrinth’ and ...”

“... Sash and curse the Pope of Rome.They held a pistol so hard against his foreheadthere was still the mark of an O when he got home.One of the finest poems, and typically tantalising, is the title poem from Why Brownlee left, about a man who vanishes into thin air one morning, leaving his team still harnessed to the plough:Shifting their weight from foot ...”

“... were smart and talented, as were the painters associated with the gallery: William de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Grace Hartigan, Alfred Leslie, Larry Rivers, Norman Bluhm and Fairfield Porter. It all made for a vigorous little scene, a fair bit of it played ...”

“... Krasner hearing a book go hurtling across the studio next to hers, smashing against a wall, and Jackson Pollock emerging with the words: ‘Goddamn it! That guy has done everything. There’s nothing left.’ But the further point of the anecdote is that Pollock did find ways, eventually, to turn the ‘everything’ to his advantage. That was partly ...”

“... radically alien. Even that wasn’t the end of it. The banning of prayer in schools seemed to mark the expulsion of religious morality from the American state; the renewal of mass immigration, suspended between the mid-1920s and the mid-1960s, brought the white middle and working class face to face with a new set of ethnic challenges and rivals; and the ...”

“... To Hester, Johnson was at once a mentor and ‘a great man-child’, while acting as, in Jackson Bate’s phrase, ‘a combination of friend and a sort of toy elephant’ to her children. He was particularly fond of the eldest, Hester Maria, a reserved, secretive and wilful girl he nicknamed ‘Queeney’. Uninterested in what her mother tried to ...”