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“... of the ongoing restructuring of an older history of European advance and Indian retreat, of white modernity and Indian tradition. He is a ‘revisionist’, as the conservative guardians of the received and sacred past history of the United States call historians who add to, subtract from or reinterpret the received. They use ‘revisionist’ as an ...”

“... James. ‘Missouri outlawry,’ Stiles writes, ‘was an appendage of the Southern-separatist, white supremacist revolt of the former Confederacy.’ According to Stiles, James, like the Ku Klux Klansmen, was fighting against Reconstruction. Reconstruction involved the division of the conquered South into military districts whose commanders supervised the ...”

“... I live and teach in a country as parochial as it is powerful, and there are moments that bring home to me how American I am. Several years ago a colleague, who had served as the American ambassador to Pakistan, tried to arrange a series of meetings between a visiting Pakistani general and teachers and students at Stanford University. In those innocent days before the semi-autonomous tribal regions of Pakistan had become a staple of the coverage of terrorism, and pictures of ‘tribal’ leaders in Iraq graced the pages of every American newspaper, I wasn’t quite sure why he wanted me and my students to meet the general ...”

“... or rather, Leland Stanford Junior University, as it is still officially called. As the historian Richard White puts it in his lively account of the institution’s origins, ‘without the dead child – Leland Stanford Junior – the Stanford campus would be just another patch in the suburbs sweeping south from San Francisco.’Leland Stanford Jr, born ...”

“... of recall or underdrawn his characters, McCourt’s books and manner are engaging. The historian Richard White describes his book as an ‘anti-memoir’. White, who teaches history at Stanford, has traced the story of another post-Independence immigrant – his mother. Sarah Walsh emigrated to the United States from ...”

“... and Alison Smithson, who displayed a series of found objects in a post-apocalyptic mirrored shed. Richard Hamilton’s group presented a funfair vision that launched the British Pop Art movement. Robby the Robot, star of the science-fiction movie Forbidden Planet, opened the show because, according to the critic Reyner Banham, he was much ‘easier to book ...”

“... There have been​ two recent opportunities to see Richard Mosse’s remarkable work in London. Broken Spectre (2022), a film and series of photographs, was displayed earlier this year in an echoing, pseudo-industrial basement space at 180 the Strand; the Hayward Gallery’s ecologically themed group show Dear Earth, which runs until 3 September, includes the related but more austere multiscreen Grid (Palimi-ú) and photographs taken on the Rio Tigre in the Peruvian Amazon ...”

“... creative risk. Bois’s enthusiasm and Foster’s acerbity are both salutary. But, crucially, the white hat/black hat split between innovation and retrenchment can also blur. Two instances of interpretative grey might be seen in the juxtaposition of 1907 with 1959 – high Modernist painting as compared to low Modernist salesmanship. Krauss, in her ...”

“... Richard Hamilton, who died on 13 September at the age of 89, invented the idea of Pop art, along with his colleagues in the Independent Group, more than 50 years ago. In ‘Persuading Image’, a lecture he gave in 1959, Hamilton argued, well before it was a commonplace, that consumer society depends on the manufacturing of desire through design, forever updated by the forced obsolescence of style ...”

“... Richard Titmuss has cast light on civilisation by comparing what happens when blood is sold and when it is donated. Edward Bristow’s subject, likewise, is a service which may be either donated or traded – or obtained under duress. His exploration of it takes him into unfamiliar recesses of public and private depravity, and shines a torch into the laundry room of Judaism ...”

“... of later mixed success at the English public schools made no impact on the thesis. T.H. White’s Sir Grummore, discussing ‘eddication’ with Sir Ector, remains utterly sure that learning Latin is the main part of education, though he himself ‘could never get beyond the Future Simple of Utor. It was a third of the way down the left-hand ...”

“... In his new book, Richard Bernstein – one of the best reporters at the New York Times – offers some detailed descriptions, and some solid criticisms, of a serious nuisance. Unfortunately, he then tries to inflate this nuisance into a dangerous monster. He offers a lot of useful information about what one segment of the American Left has been doing recently, and his analyses are very acute ...”

“... today’s First report of heat. The Prometheus Ice Company Has expanded Its fleet Of blue and White wagons. Find them At the hottest spots In town. Once one crashed And the ice rolled Like diamonds. People took it Dripping Off the asphalt As police drew up Like azure ...”

“... was in the hands of New College, Oxford, and they do not appear to have patronised reformers. Richard White, vicar in 1561, was called to the church courts for the erroneous belief ‘that men had free will to do good and bad,’ and William Lambert, vicar from 1574 to 1592, used holy water in baptism freely, and preached rarely. Much of the work of ...”

“... what a cuff!’ one is tempted to add, all stiff with brocade. Early on, the poet and critic Richard Howard stigmatised him as a bejewelled poet, and that characterisation stuck, though it suited only his earliest work. In that way, as in so many others, Merrill was like Proust. Just as no one, after reading Les Plaisirs et les jours or Proust’s ...”