“... as his writing. When I reached the area near Columbia University, I remembered that as a student young Kerouac had looked out of his Livingston Hall dormitory straight at a frieze on the side of the (then) new Columbia library. It said ‘Goethe ... Voltaire ... Shakespeare ... Molière ... Dante ...’ And sure enough, just as you’d feared, Jean-Louis ...”

“... too, on the greed and duplicity of the nabobs in general, and Warren Hastings in particular. As a young man, Lytton Strachey admired Hastings and wrote a long thesis on him, while dismissing Burke as ‘an ignorant enthusiast’. What strikes me on rereading those great philippics is, on the contrary, their exactness and perceptiveness. In his speech in ...”

“... requirements and raises pay, Osama’s guarantee of hardship, hunger and probable death has young Muslims jumping the jihad queue. By body count – which proved an unsure indicator in Vietnam – the US is winning. It has killed and incarcerated more Muslims than Osama has Westerners. But Osama has the upper hand. The American invasion and occupation ...”

“... congenial to Maclise, who had been seduced by the medievalising of his friends and patrons in the Young England movement. As the creator of Sir Mulberry Hawk and Lord Frederick Verisopht, not to mention the Lady Flabella, Dickens must have had to swallow hard before praising this hymn to nobility. The next time Dickens tried his hand at art criticism was ...”

“... getting dressed next door to Nijinsky at a club swimming-pool in Bar Harbor, the set-designer Robert Edmond Jones was surprised by a knock at the door: I open it. A middle-aged man stands there, exquisitely dressed in fastidious nuances of pearl grey which harmonise with the tones of his silvery, scented moustache. He is tall and willowy and his delicate ...”

“... The subject of a 1938 Spencer Tracy movie, it had a reputation for turning troublemakers into nice young men, and was the gentlest place he could have hoped for. But after four days, he and a boy called Blackie Nelson broke out, stole a car, got hold of a gun, robbed a grocery store and a casino, and headed for Peoria. There the pair became apprentices to ...”

“... with Lincoln himself in the audience.It was said that Mary was ‘a beauty’ with many young men to choose among. That the one she decided on, John Moore, was known only for his sense of humour and love of the theatre is puzzling at first – she has seemed so earnest – but it turns out that performance was something she too enjoyed. Pretending ...”

“... software, but for decades this enormous investment seemed to pay no dividends. As the economist Robert Solow put it in 1987, ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’ Perhaps too much time was wasted in training employees to use computers; perhaps the sorts of activity that computers make more efficient, like word ...”

“... who could negotiate what he called (borrowing the phrase from Walter Lippmann, the energetic young editor of the New Republic) a ‘peace without victory’. Later, he would propose a much more unusual and high-minded plan for enduring peace – replacing militarist regimes with democracies – which liberal intellectuals as well as conservative ...”

“... at every bed. The message was clear. If a cripple could become president, there was hope for these young men. Most of his staff were in tears. Yet Roosevelt infuriated almost as many people as he inspired. In 1932 the columnist Elmer Davis called him someone ‘who thinks that the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line but a ...”

“... freedom struggle. The four political assassinations that define the 1960s – those of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and King – stand in for the very large numbers (almost all black and lost to national public memory) martyred to racial justice. It is now a commonplace that, instead of protecting Southern civil rights workers, the FBI (with the ...”

“... a return to the historic quartier as the basis of urban planning in Europe; on the other side were Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, who embraced the commercial strip (‘billboards are almost all right,’ they proclaimed in 1972 in Learning from Las Vegas, a manifesto to which Delirious New York is an indirect riposte). Koolhaas could ...”

“... glove and tiara set’ in the stalls, the balletomanes in the cheap gallery seats – bearded young men and intense young women with bobbed hair – and leading intellectuals too. Clive Bell praised the absence of naturalism and the emptying out of the characters; T.S. Eliot argued that on stage Massine embodied all ...”

“... Posterity’), which gives an account of his life up to 1351, is no less carefully tailored. As a young man he studied law in Montpellier and Bologna, but swiftly abandoned it after the death of his father. He describes his youth as full of the usual ‘vanities’ – fashions, feasts, amorous dalliances. These, we are led to believe, took place before he ...”