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“... believe that a volume of Saki’s stories, chosen from eight miles of second-hand books in a New York store, saved his life. That, he says in his introduction to this collection, should not be confused with changing his life. Faced with a 22-city promotional tour of America for one of his books (‘Not, you might venture, a deathly predicament in and of ...”

“... of these Russian billionaires had wined and dined European and American leaders and officials. Peter Mandelson, then the EU trade commissioner, and George Osborne, the future chancellor, spent some time on the aluminium mogul Oleg Deripaska’s yacht Queen K off the coast of Corfu in 2008. Queen K, later renamed Clio and now renamed Altair, was in the ...”

“... Sir Peter Medawar is the most distinguished biologist in Britain today. His work on immunology during the 1950s is the inspiration of all modern transplantation surgery, and was judged worthy of a Nobel Prize. In addition to his technical work, he also writes and lectures on science to a broader audience, and with more grace and wit than any one else who has tried his skill in that field ...”

“... McCartney, Patsy Kensit, Ian Botham, Jordan, Mohammed al Fayed, Cherie Blair, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair. (If there are names in that list you haven’t heard of, don’t worry, none of them matters as much as they think they do.) At a Christmas lunch at the Mirabelle for his Mirror columnists, Morgan remembers ecstatically how ...”

“... In a respectful but chary review of The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) in the New York Review of Books, Nadine Gordimer wrote about J.M. Coetzee’s ‘conscious choice’ of allegory as a literary mode in his first three novels. The reasons for this, she speculated, were temperamental: It seemed he did so out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and their daily, grubby, tragic consequences in which, like everyone else living in South Africa, he is up to the neck, and about which he had an inner compulsion to write ...”

“... well as a grain of rice inscribed with verse. The show was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The following year he received a prize from the National Small Works Competition, judged by a curator from the Guggenheim Museum.In December 1990 an exhibition was planned for the Museum of Jurassic Technology: in effect a ...”

“... was offered recently by a young man who goes by the name DJ Whoo Kid, has a radio show on the New York station Hot 97 and produces work with gangsta-rap outfits with names like G-Unit and Lil Scrappy. According to MTV News, ‘Whoo Kid says he originally connected with Bahrain’s royal family when he was recommended to DJ their parties by mutual ...”

“... seeing through performance, in life as in art. When he was running the theatrical workshop in New York where he found the actors and developed the ideas for his first movie, Shadows (1957-59), he told an interviewer that most experiences in life are as ‘staged’ and ‘artificial’ as most dramatic performances, and that the problem ‘for modern ...”

“... in his Yale class, but his classmates thought of him as a nice one. He wrote in the New York Times about his admiration for Barack Obama, and a classmate, Sofia Nelson, remembers that whatever Vance’s qualms about abortion, ‘what he relayed to me is what his grandmother had taught him, which is that you can never know what situation a woman is ...”

“... flame) has been observed as frequently as legend suggests, and it is not clear whether or not Peter Mayle himself witnessed the burning of the ten-pound note that had masqueraded as a tip (although he claims that the perpetrator of the deed is a friend). But why then does this legend persist? Presumably because, for some, the idea of wealth, power and ...”

“... Christians that had laid waste to the refineries and the surrounding boom town. Crude World is Peter Maass’s account of the violence, tyranny, poverty, environmental degradation, corporate malfeasance, corruption and state failure that seem to be fuelled by oil. By these lights, what happened in Baku might be taken as confirmation of the ‘resource ...”

“... us was an image of jagged fields of colour. The speaker, a black-clad young architect from New York, was delivering his Fellow’s Lecture. Since most of the previous lectures had been given by historians occupied with mapping the drainage ditches of ancient Pompeii or cataloguing the patronage of Renaissance door jambs, his rambling ...”

“... A few weeks ago, in New York, I accompanied a friend on a shopping expedition. While we were in a novelty gift shop on Columbus Avenue, she bought me a rubber stamp which she said I’d find useful when I got back to my Arts Council office in London. I know what she means, though, in fact, I’ve found myself using it, not on office memos (strong at times though the temptation has been), but on press clippings relating to the Arts Council ...”

“... modern Anglo-American publishing. Who but an agent could have negotiated the reported contract for Peter Benchley’s Island: $1.5 m. for movie rights, 5 per cent of royalties for the theme music, $75,000 if selected by the Book of the Month Club, $25,000 for every week the novel made the New York Times best-seller ...”

“... most of the harassment directed at his campaign, could treat him so shabbily. ‘You’re from New York,’ Nemtsov said at one point, turning to me. ‘Who is more popular in New York, Nemtsov or Tkachev?’ The answer was Nemtsov, but we weren’t in New York. Nemtsov’s time as deputy ...”