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“... and ‘everyone’ wants it or they’ll die. In order to accommodate this novel notion of deluxe, Dana Thomas, in her startling and richly informative book, draws a line between luxury and ‘the luxury industry’: The luxury industry has changed the way people dress. It has realigned our economic class system. It has changed the way we interact. It ...”

“... both Verlaine and Rimbaud. He was always Rimbaud.’) The two wrote poems together, and for a time Dana seemed to be not only a lover but that perfect friend whom Kirkup, like Frederick Rolfe, was always seeking. Kirkup’s book is liberally sprinkled with poems, most of them rather humdrum and low-spirited. The ones on which ...”

“... else does an argument about illegality and injustice go? When in 1869 the Boston lawyer Richard Dana added a postscript to his celebrated narrative Two Years before the Mast, reflecting on the brutality which he had witnessed a quarter of a century earlier as a boy at sea, he was quick to insist that a ship’s master must have ‘powers commensurate with ...”

“... myth was the provincial self-absorption of Revivalist Ireland, but the record of a journal like Dana suggests anything but general literary paralysis: as well as rejecting Joyce’s inchoate ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ in 1904, it outspokenly attacked the Church and the Revival, as well as publishing George Moore, an important figure in the ...”

“... or Eakins, or Hood, or Bierstadt, or Winslow Homer, or to quite thin commercial art like Charles Dana Gibson’s Edwardian girls, or to Thomas Hart Benton’s agrarian patriotism. That older work shows illustrators and painters finding things no one else had quite seen, things that would thereafter infect the visual ...”

“... culminates in an intervention into the feverish controversy surrounding the white American artist Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket, depicting the lynched black teenager Emmett Till, on show at the Whitney Biennial. Halfway through the essay, Smith quotes Baldwin on the fundamental absurdity of racial categorisation: ‘What white people have to do is try ...”

“... on Halleck on arrival in New York in 1842, but later wrote him off as a mere imitator. Richard Dana thought his ‘Marco Bozzaris’ was America’s best lyric poem. John Quincy Adams referred to one of his poems in a speech to the House of Representatives in 1836. Most inexplicable of all, on 15 May 1877, fifty thousand people gathered in Central Park to ...”

“... no’ (1960), for instance, Enright elevates his rejection of the flamboyance of Dylan Thomas and the Apocalyptics into a moral injunction: Epochs of parakeets, of peacocks, of paradisiac birds – Then one bald owl croaked, No. Such table-thumping seems a bit dated now – one is inadvertently reminded of television’s ‘Just Say ...”

“... nostalgia need not imply a desire simply to flee the bewildering present, to go back home, as Thomas Wolfe put it, ‘to the escapes of Time and Memory’: the historian’s purpose in going home is to recover something left there, some knowledge or power or psychic condition which, brought back to the present, can help us all to feel more at home in this ...”

“... bought The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying by Marie Kondo and Decluttering at the Speed of Life by Dana White. I sought out novels and short stories that feature hoarders (Gogol’s Dead Souls, in which Stepan Plyushkin ‘fishes’ in his village for worthless things; Virginia Woolf’s ‘Solid Objects’, in which a young man gives up a promising ...”

“... affect them hypnotically, adding that he had done this himself, carefully choosing the minor poet, Thomas Hardy? Would Dear Reader bear with me while I retire to reread A Portrait now? I shall not delay him more than two seconds, as when one reads a cassette letter from a friend whereon he says he must halt now for lunch and resumes after two seconds ...”

“... and in the Northern Ireland Assembly. A number of MEPs first achieved celebrity in other fields: Dana, the Irish Eurovision popstar, Michael Cashman, one-time star of EastEnders, as well as sportspersons of various kinds: a Finnish world champion rally driver, an Italian mountaineer, a Spanish Olympic yachting gold medallist. Indeed, probably because ...”

“... behaviour below. The star of that film, Keanu Reeves, also appears in The Matrix (1999) as Thomas Anderson, a.k.a. Neo, a company man turned hacker turned messiah. At the film’s conclusion, Neo phones in a proclamation of defiance from a booth on a busy street in the virtual world into which the bulk of the human species has been absorbed, before ...”

“... this key. And in a certain phase of life – with male adolescents it may come from a reading of Thomas Wolfe – the gratification of such writing can be immense. How much of Agee is like this? Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is the most ambitious and fully worked of his books, and the solemnities of diction, circumstantial proofs of localism, and care ...”