“... are more likely to find it in Brooklyn or Queens, and the banker’s island paradise that young people leave behind is decidedly less vital without them. Bender makes a strong claim for the role of creative intellectuals in New York’s political culture in his six central chapters. An ambitious essay on ‘Modernist Aesthetics and Urban ...”

“... as though what’s going on out there were more interesting to her than the rigmarole in the car. Robert Siodmak, the director, told her what to do in minute detail, forcing her to play down her performance. Whoever deserves the credit, the result is a little piece of perfection, a rare instance of downbeat, off-guard grace. Gardner was never so good ...”

“... a demand for massive reparation payments to black Americans. The Monroe Ride was hosted by Robert Franklin Williams. Nicknamed ‘Chairman Rob’ by his supporters, Williams was second only to the Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X as an outspoken advocate of ‘armed self-reliance’. The head of the Monroe branch of the NAACP in the 1950s, he assembled ...”

“... drunk, falls down stairs, gets sacked and never sings on the stage again, but instead enthrals the young John Major with musical evenings in their Brixton tenement. Both the cat burglar and the Jamaican have delicious girlfriends who are probably no better than they should be. The cat burglar’s girl disappeared whenever he went to jail but when he was there ...”

“... or desire. There are few scenes more melancholy in 19th-century fiction, or in paintings such as Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s The Last Day in the Old Home, than the enforced sale of household goods. Thackeray made a specialism of clearance, in Vanity Fair and then again in The Newcomes; George Eliot followed suit, at length, in The Mill on the ...”

“... up in some of his later writing as frank Orientalism (‘Now I constantly see Dunja, beautiful, young, appearing in the oases, and the desert’). A happier influence on his work came from the French which was much spoken around him and whose poetry he discovered in the pages of the Mercure de France. When he left for Europe in 1912, he touched base in ...”

“... on the periphery. Nor did many in the outside world realise quite what was emerging in Russia. Robert Lansing, Wilson’s secretary of state, whom Tooze rescues from the obscurity to which he is usually consigned, pointedly noted that this was a new type of despotism, intelligent rather than ignorant like the tsarist one, and to be feared. Wilson preferred ...”

“... monument to drink.5Mies had dreamed of building skyscrapers since the early 1920s when, as a young architect in Berlin recently returned from the war, he’d been seduced by images of the thrusting New York skyline. Influenced by the utopian futurism of Paul Scheerbart, author of Glasarchitektur, Mies proposed a 20-storey tower completely sheathed in ...”

“... most notoriously violent moment. The period has been much written about in the forty years since Robert Conquest made the Soviet 1930s synonymous with the Great Terror. Scholarship on prewar Stalinism has bifurcated. On the one hand, studies of the Terror have become more detailed and nuanced. Now that the Soviet archives have been opened, it seems that the ...”

“... missionaries, to which Parliament responded in 1868 by authorising a punitive expedition. General Robert Napier raised 13,000 troops, 20,000 logistic personnel, many thousands of mules and camels and 44 elephants in India, and shipped them to the Red Sea. After marching 780 miles overland to Tewodros’s capital, he defeated the imperial army (with the loss ...”

“... her: “John Peel – what? You mean the dead disc jockey?” And then I said: “Don’t you mean Robert Peel? Cos if it was John Peel, we’d all be known as Johnnies.”’ This gets a really good laugh and Jim, who is cut from rather rougher cloth than the officers from the serious and organised crime squad, develops his theme. ‘I mean, speaking of ...”

“... and Carmel. Originally, Protestants lived here, and later, the area became more mixed, with young lecturers bringing in a dash of counter-culture; but in recent years the Holy Land has become a place of student-dominated multiple-occupancy housing and raucous anti-social behaviour, which tends to culminate in riotous stand-offs with the police on St ...”

“... in case anyone had missed the point of Bush’s statement, his deputy national security adviser, Robert Gates (now Obama’s secretary of defence), spelled it out a few weeks later: ‘Saddam is discredited and cannot be redeemed. His leadership will never be accepted by the world community. Therefore,’ Gates continued, ‘Iraqis will pay the price while ...”

“... companies have been caught up in controversial cases of suicide, such as that of Dan Markingson, a young man who stabbed himself to death while taking Seroquel in an AstraZeneca trial at the University of Minnesota, and Traci Johnson, who hanged herself in a study of Cymbalta at the Eli Lilly trial site in Indianapolis. Britain had its own disaster at ...”

“... also a good deal of repetition. We are reminded four times of Blake’s maxim, almost as often of Robert Burton’s admittedly splendid description of tears as ‘excrementitious humours of the third concoction’. But Dixon’s instinct for connections and comparisons is unfailingly sharp and illuminating. He ranges effortlessly from Margery Kempe ...”