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“... the orderly world of kings and queens and emperors and empresses falls on their narrow shoulders. Mark Steinberg and Vladimir Khrustalev’s Fall of the Romanovs is a collection of documents from the very end of the tsarist period which tells the story of Nicholas’s last days. Robert Massie’s The Romanovs: The Final Chapter tells what happened to the ...”

“... Revolution, and ‘if its sentences are still unfinished, it is up to us to finish them.’ Mark Steinberg is the only one of the professional historians writing on the revolution to confess to any lingering emotional attachment to it. Of course, revolutionary idealism and daring leaps into the unknown tend to result in hard landings, but, ...”

“... The startling claim of Leo Steinberg’s new book is that over the past four centuries the real meaning of much of the religious art of the Renaissance has been lost. He argues that in representations of Christ, both as an infant and as an adult, the genitals had a particular theological significance to which we are now oblivious because of the modern world’s ‘massive historic retreat from the mythical grounds of Christianity ...”

“... of the hat-check girl, borrowed in part from an A.J. Liebling New Yorker article, is told in Neil Steinberg’s shaggy-dog history, Hatless Jack. The book floats amiably back and forth, but spends most time on JFK. Steinberg’s thesis is simply stated. Once upon a time, everyone wore hats; then no one did; Kennedy was not ...”

“... painting, for the older kind of dialogue with tradition broke down; the criticism of Leo Steinberg, so delicate in its way of relating a work to its context in the oeuvre, so subtle about the now very complex relation to tradition, is a model of the right sort of response. But in writing about fiction we experience some vulgar inhibition that may ...”

“... Greenberg to champion Abstract Expressionism, and deftly deflected its discourse towards what Leo Steinberg would term ‘other criteria’. ‘The subjects which Jasper Johns chose to paint up to 1958,’ Steinberg wrote in ‘Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art’ (1962), still the most influential essay on the ...”

“... historian of the PCI, describes an Apulian peasant who kept a map in his stables where he would mark with a pin the progress of the Russian advance during 1943 and 1944 and then calculate how many hours it would take them to cross the Adriatic and get to his village. In Sicily, militants like Calogero waited for ‘Uncle Joe’ (in Sicilian dialect, lu zi ...”

“... of the image. In this way it presaged the reorientation of the picture plane that the critic Leo Steinberg declared, 15 years later, to be ‘expressive of the most radical shift in the subject matter of art, the shift from nature to culture’ – a move towards a postmodernist conception of the image that is credited to Rauschenberg above all. If ...”

“... dignity and heroic forbearance of the Everyman-Sisyphus figure pushing his rock – or, as Saul Steinberg has it in the old cartoon, pushing a huge, boulder-like question-mark – up a hill. The poems that elicited most controversy were the cycles ‘Landscapes’ and ‘List’. Here’s ‘On the Table’, a poem from ...”

“... its strong challenge to the continued dominance of ‘style’ in art history, as the evidentiary mark of artist and period alike. In one sense, then, the book is a continuation of the postmodernist critique of ‘the author’ in the very field where such categories were first made central. But it is also a critique of the new default of the discipline, a ...”

“... was sympathetic to the Algerians. This ambiguous, even deconstructive, position may have left its mark on his son. Certainly Bois sees a benefit in ‘foreignness’, which he explains as ‘the freedom with which the stranger can look at a complex cultural system without having to fully know or understand the rules of its game, a freedom that often enables ...”