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“... the same facts, reflect and may reinforce the change of mood described above. Marmor, Mashaw and Harvey’s excellent book begins with the statement: ‘This book has a simple message: America’s social welfare efforts are taking a bum rap.’ They continue: ‘The vision of social welfare policy generated during these two decades has often been misleading ...”

“... Was​ Lydia Harvey ‘respectable’ or wasn’t she? This was a question on which a surprising number of people had a view in the summer of 1910, including the prime minister of New Zealand. Earlier that year, Harvey, then sixteen, had been working as a photographer’s assistant in Wellington when she suddenly left her boarding house ...”

“... the diaries and letters already available. The early novels reflect Barbara Pym’s love for Henry Harvey, whom she met at Oxford; her alternately anguished and wry but unrewarded pursuit of him is affectingly revealed in the pre-war section of A Very Private Life, and it is touching to find that he visited her in hospital in Oxford three days before she ...”

“... There is no evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald saw The Manchurian Candidate, which was released in 1962, a year before Kennedy’s assassination. A more plausible cinematic influence on him is Suddenly (1954), in which Frank Sinatra plays a President’s assassin who acquired his taste for killing in the Second World War ...”

“... in Frankfurt takes off all her clothes as he discourses on the dangers of spontaneity. Lee Harvey Oswald is photographed holding up two guns, together with the Daily Worker and the Trotskyite Militant: ‘There he stands in the midst of his iconography.’ It is the job of the ‘defining imagination’ to explain such moments. (Of course there are ...”

“... offered the Polish crown: absurd, but can there be smoke without any fire whatsoever? In May 1575, Philip Sidney returned to Little England. If England was small beer, so was he, no baron but plain Mr Sidney. He was 20 years of age. Sidney’s career makes a bizarre episode in that endless saga which is Britain-in-Europe. To understand why so much was ...”

“... Niro gets to play the 40-year-old Sheeran, as well as the same man at 55 and 83. For the record, Harvey Keitel (b. 1939), Al Pacino (b. 1940) and Joe Pesci (b. 1943) also get to inhabit different times, though Pacino, as Jimmy Hoffa, doesn’t live so long. All of these performances are amazing, but I would single out Pesci for special mention. The angry guy ...”

“... hung out with Angela Davis in the early 1970s, and surely Don DeLillo’s speculations on Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra merited attention. There is at least one known case. In 2013 William Vollmann wrote about getting hold of his own FBI file and discovering that during the 1990s, following an anonymous tip, he was suspected of being the ...”

“... is missing from the book. So are Muriel Spark, V.S. Naipaul, and the explosive William Golding. Philip Larkin is present. Not really for his poems as for the tirelessly sardonic and sarcastic bulletins on national life sent in letters to his friend Monica Jones. Larkin’s offendedness was soothed twenty years on when Margaret Thatcher wrested the crown ...”

“... There is a world inside the world,’ Lee Harvey Oswald repeats in Don DeLillo’s novel Libra (1988). The phrase suggests wheels within wheels, partly because Oswald is obsessively riding the New York subway when we first hear it. ‘There’s more to it,’ David Ferrie says in the same novel. ‘There’s always more to it ...”

“... we willingly confused with the actors who played them. The new retro cool I wallowed in had Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade as its source: the hard men with soft, democratic centres, American Romantics tinged with the Founding Fathers and Melville’s melancholic sense of humanity, the people’s Lancelots, who were dragged, flinching with distaste, into ...”

“... to watch over her. It is a familiar scheme in the movies, akin to General Sternwood enlisting Philip Marlowe to take care of his wild daughter in The Big Sleep. And we learned to trust the immaculate Marlowe and to love Bogart playing him, because no matter the fix he’s in, the private eye has a wisecrack and flawless assurance, as well as Lauren Bacall ...”

“... to find him composing a verbal emblem book, Gli Eroici Furori. This was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney in 1585 and exercised a profound influence upon Elizabethan poetry. In devising and explaining his visual conceits, Bruno aimed to transform the increasingly stale conventions of Petrarchan love poetry into philosophically significant devices. His ...”

“... a Gothic spandrel. De Morgan’s strong unassertive style adapted well. It was cool enough for Philip Webb, but it could be robust. Norman Shaw used the tiles in the ‘Old English’ interior of the Tabard Inn at Bedford Park, the artistic suburb, built from the late 1870s, where the inhabitants ‘read Rossetti by Japanesey lamps’. De Morgan still ...”

“... we shall require an age of reason,’ wrote Christopher Hitchens last year on the dust jacket of Harvey Kaye’s recent book on Paine.* And as if to reinforce that message, he has now himself published a little book on Paine, a ‘biography’ of Rights of Man. It begins with a dedication, ‘by permission’, to President Jalal Talabani: ‘first elected ...”