“... Callas’s correspondence with her godfather, Leonidas Lantzounis, a Greek doctor living in New York. Callas wrote to him over a period of thirty years with astonishing frankness, especially about her notoriously hostile feelings towards her mother and sister. Secondly, there were transcripts of conversations between Callas and the American music critic ...”

“... In January 1957 the New York Police Department arrested a man called George Metesky, whose activities over the previous 16 and a bit years had earned him the sobriquet ‘the Mad Bomber’. The Bomber had planted more than thirty explosive devices, favouring public places such as cinemas, train stations, libraries and phone booths ...”

“... years kept its head safely below the parapet? It wasn’t always so. On 26 October 1988, the New York Times carried a full-page advertisement for liberalism. Headed ‘A Reaffirmation of Principle’, it openly rebuked Ronald Reagan for deriding ‘the dreaded L-word’ and treating ‘liberals’ and ‘liberalism’ as terms of opprobrium. Liberal ...”

“... No one I know who’s died in my lifetime … has been interred in a grave.’Born in 1947 in New York City, Kathy Acker lived and worked as an adult in lots of places, most significantly downtown Manhattan, San Diego, London and San Francisco, with long spells of gigging and episodes of sudden geographical flight. In her lifetime she published eight or 13 or ...”

“... June Allyson as Jo, Janet Leigh as Meg, Elizabeth Taylor as Amy and Margaret O’Brien as Beth. Peter Lawford played a glamorous Laurie – indeed, the screenplay describes Laurie as looking ‘not unlike our idea of Edgar Allan Poe’. Armstrong’s Little Women is the most British and Pickwickian of the movie versions, set in a vague 19th-century ...”

“... Harry Ransom Research Center at Austin, Texas, the University of Southern California, UCLA, New York Public Library and the Huntington. Three of the (alleged) competitors were within a thirty-mile radius of Isherwood’s home in Santa Monica. The Ransom Center has dovetailing collections of Spender, Connolly and John Lehmann material. NYPL is a main deposit ...”

“... Roud is a sensible critic, formerly the Guardian’s film reviewer and now Director of the New York Film Festival. ‘I tend to be wary,’ he says, ‘of systematic criticism and of any form of critical terrorism. And therefore wary of the new kinds of film criticism which have arisen over the past decade.’ ‘Wary’ might mean just ...”

“... criticism as a slur upon good scholarship as they ramble through everything from the castration of Peter Abelard to 19th-century Wyoming’s gun laws, in their effort to persuade the persevering reader of the imminence of this apocalypse. In order to save ourselves, we must sell our over-mortgaged houses, rid ourselves of debt and head from the cities to ...”

“... it made Self momentarily speechless. ‘Belly of an architect,’ he said, using the title of the Peter Greenaway movie to express his amazement. ‘A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the Western eye,’ Joan Didion said. She was writing about California, where pools, in her view, were less a symbol of ...”

“... elude that soporific ‘and then’? So, it is little surprise to find the prolific genre-bender Peter Ackroyd beginning his brief biography of Edgar Allan Poe with a recounting of his subject’s final days. Never mind that Paul Strathern’s recent biographical study, Poe in 90 Minutes, and a new novel by Matthew Pearl, The Poe Shadow, made the same ...”

“... add a sensory element to studies that are mainly about something else. What did 18th-century New York, or London or Tokyo, look like? (This could be part of a general account of urban class structure in early modern times.) How, exactly, did church bells sound in late medieval villages? (This, for a study of local religious culture.) What was the range of ...”

“... crisis and the crisis of American materialism coincided. A 35-year-old celebrity when he left New York Harbor on the SS America, he was the subject of mocking magazine profiles: he felt he had already passed through fame to caricature, from poet to provocateur. He was haunted by a vision he had had at the age of 22, when, while reading Blake, a voice ...”

“... of Joseph Herman’s images of Welsh miners, Joan Eardley’s Glasgow tenement scenes or Peter de Francia’s political paintings further weakens the realist cause. But Garlake’s assessment of Berger’s stance seems fair, recognising as it does the difficulty he had in formulating criteria to match his beliefs. He focused, she argues, on the ...”

“... about the Astor Place riot, I too visited a couple of the archives he consulted, namely the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and the New York Historical Society. Long fascinated by the events of 10 May 1849, I couldn’t leave Manhattan without making a pilgrimage to Astor Place. But I could find no ...”

“... Literature should be naked,’ Peter Stamm writes. Words should never obscure the story, ‘its warmth, its form, its vitality’. It’s form that critics in Germany and his native Switzerland are talking about when they compare Stamm to Raymond Carver. Take ‘The True Pure Land’, one of his more ‘naked’ stories ...”