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“... Church was a 19th-century American painter. The picture made 2½ million dollars at auction in New York: a reminder that provincial values – in a number of senses of those words – can still surprise. ‘The Americans,’ Professor Novak writes, ‘participated in the great landscape adventure’ of the 19th century ‘with an art that grew out of its ...”

“... close: a notice tacked to the entrance of his 1951 exhibition in the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, read: ‘There is a tendency to look at large pictures from a distance. The large pictures in this exhibition are intended to be seen from a short distance.’ Then, with your visual field filled to overflowing, see what happens, attending in particular to ...”

“... to justify his principles of planning and construction. The present exhibition puts his first New York Museum of Modern Art show in context. He had been an American citizen for three years when, in 1947, he was invited to display his work and, almost as important, to control the way in which it was displayed. Terence Riley’s essay, ‘Making History: Mies ...”

“... the bohemian interstices of the city. So are Nan Goldin’s colour photographs of friends in New York and Paris in the 1990s. Kollwitz and Schad interpret; they are telling us something, inviting us to feel. Evans and Goldin are showing us things but offering less information about how we could or should react. The juxtapositions are not particularly ...”

“... They disturb the appearance of streets, which look best when they are simple: a granite kerb, York stone slabs, a well-graded carriageway. That is the proper way to underline any distinguished old frontage; it’s what the broad pavement lined with plane trees outside the British Museum does. Jane Austen on tarmac is as much an anachronism as Jane Austen ...”

“... was reproduced in these pages, the exhibition had just opened in the Morgan Library in New York. Most of the items were (or were very like) drawings made for print. The framed originals would not, I thought, add much to the intense pleasure to be had from the reproductions. Now that the exhibition has come to London – it can be seen until 15 February ...”

“... Despite a new paralysis – my back –Am stirred, perhaps, to mine the new resource,Put down my worn suitcases and unpack.[Publications]Reader, should I turn another page?Fly off to somewhere, maybe even worse?Or limp serenely into middle ageAnd try to flog this flimsy book of verse? [c/o Fig Tree PocketQldAustraliaphotopies ofrelevantdocumentati ...”

“... made to assist private prayer. There are several versions of an Ecce Homo – the one from New York is the most affecting. Christ is shown as a man who has been beaten up, the facial type as well as the expression is one you see in news pictures from the Middle East. The beard is thin and fluffy, the eyebrows are raised in a puzzled inverted V, the mouth ...”

“... of Kipling). Indeed, the last essay in Bartleby in Manhattan is an attack on an English critic, Peter Conrad, for trying his hand at just this sort of thing. In these American observers and explainers two characteristics recur. The first is a close attention to the significance of detail (‘no ideas but in things’) which is often left to speak for ...”

“... of their native speech. It did not matter whether one had been trained in the schools of York, or Paris, or Bologna – Latin was your language, quite as much as if it had been learned in Rome, and you would write chronicles or treatises or poems in that language, not in the local vernacular. Peter Godman’s ...”

“... The​ American photographer Peter Hujar once told a friend who was feeling unattractive: ‘As you’re walking along, say to yourself: I’m me.’ Hujar’s subjects seem to have heeded the same advice: they exhibit a self-possession tending to the monumental. You can see it in his 1981 portrait of the actor Madeline Kahn ...”

“... hustlers, mobsters, clubhouse politicians and tabloid sleaze that festered in a corner of New York City, a vindication of his mentor, the Mafia lawyer Roy Cohn, a figure unknown to the vast majority of enthusiasts who jammed Trump’s rallies and hailed him as the authentic voice of the people.The notion of a Trump literature begins, appropriately, with ...”

“... scoutmaster who stalked him across America until Carr pulled out a knife and killed him in New York, no longer emits much light. Nor does poor Herbert Huncke, ‘sad, sweet, dark, holy’, as Kerouac describes him in Desolation Angels. Parts of his notebooks were published in the 1960s, but he only really sputtered to life again in 1990 with an ...”

“... sometimes spontaneously, at worst like tonic water shaken to restore a semblance of lost vitality. Peter Conrad goes in more for weight. You could say of him what the earlier James extravagantly observed of the earlier Conrad, that he offers a prolonged hovering flight of the subjective over the outstretched ground of the case exposed. In other words, he ...”

“... in the wilderness. Time alters the past. Gods, too, change ... The exclamatory staccato style is Peter Vansittart’s, and so are some of the words. Many sentences get no further than half a dozen words, some are mere singletons. The manner is intentional, but no more digestible for that. Its chief purpose would seem to be the conveyance of chunks of ...”