“... my presence runs counter to their best interests.’A year later, I ran into Nora Ephron in New York and told her about the Yale evening. ‘Your friend Joan Didion seems such a fragile, breakable person,’ I said. ‘Dunne seems like an odd choice as husband.’ ‘Oh, no, Tom, you’re completely wrong,’ Nora said. ‘It’s John Gregory Dunne who’s ...”

“... to film-festival trophies and shamelessly bulbous costume jewellery. The customs officers in New York who wanted to tax his works as industrial products knew a machined surface when they saw one. The high finish which prevents the bronze sculptures from offering what is abundantly present in the wood sculptures and some of the stone carvings – evidence of ...”

“... gave 3000 francs for an umbrella though she already had a perfectly good one. In 1945 a New York journal reported she had died. She wrote back to correct the mistake, regretting that there was no formal etiquette to debunk reports of one’s own death. Earthly Rainbow, her final story collection before her real death, in 1952, is full of morphine. In ...”

“... show new cash donors from the financial world, once the Tories’ preserve. Analysis by the New York Times earlier this year found that more than half of Reform’s donations in 2024 came from people with homes in low-tax jurisdictions or with offshore business interests; 40 per cent came from climate sceptics or investors in fossil fuels. This would seem ...”

“... gitano (Gypsy Ballads) is the most famous book of Castilian verse of all time. Poet in New York is probably one of the few radically avant-garde collections with a wide international readership. By comparison, his contemporaries among the Castilian poets laboured under diverse handicaps. Juan Ramón Jiménez’s vast output of mystical symbolist verse ...”

“... novel: the picaresque story of a boy of goodish family, semi-orphaned by a terrorist attack in New York, struggling to find his rightful place in the world. In keeping with Tartt’s practice of jump-starting a plot by means of an underexplicated death, Theodore Decker, the hero-narrator, shows zero curiosity about the ‘parties that the news was alternately ...”

“... the five flights of stairs from the flat he shared with Eleanor Brewer, the former wife of the New York Times Middle East correspondent, Sam Brewer, and disappeared. It was six months before the Soviets announced that he had defected to Moscow and another five years before the British government fully acknowledged what had happened. Philby lived for four years ...”

“... This new urbanity contrasts with the ‘reptilian indifference to one another’ (Walsh quotes Peter Hill’s memorable phrase) of the instrumental lines in the introduction to The Rite of Spring. The symphony’s finale, ‘with its dazzling fugal and imitative exchanges, breathes a refinement that civilises the ferocity, without in any way drawing its ...”

“... Durcan’s Going home to Russia, coming two years after The Berlin Wall Café contains 48 poems; Peter Redgrove’s In the Hall of the Saurians, one year after its predecessor, has 34; Norman MacCaig’s Voice-over, three years on from his Collected Poems, has 58; Cat’s Whisker by Philip Gross (three years on) 41; Jouissance by William Scammell (two ...”

“... the early 1990s, the historian Gretchen Gerzina went to a London bookshop looking for a copy of Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). When she asked the shop assistant for help she was told ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945.’ In fact, as David Olusoga’s remarkable book shows, people ...”

“... and keeping up a continuous chant of ‘Om Ah Hum’ while being mugged by two youths in New York until they yelled: ‘Shut up or we’ll murder you.’ When his biographer calls Ginsberg the most famous poet in the world he means that he is the most successful platform performer. Ginsberg’s appearance on a platform is likely to draw a crowd anywhere ...”

“... guy playing at?’ says someone behind. ‘Sit down, you jerk.’ So I do. The film begins. New York. K. wants to make a seafood salad, so we go into a fishmonger’s on Bleeker. A young, fat guy sits by the door, an old grey one at the back and, doing all the work, a Puerto Rican. K.: I want a dozen mussels. Fat Guy: We don’t sell them by the ...”

“... and work among the poor, but to help rather than to observe. Rowntree and Booth admittedly went to York and London to study poverty on the ground, but they limited themselves strictly to examining physical conditions and their economic causes. Moreover, the purpose of all these investigators was to secure political reform. The Thirties attitude was at once ...”

“... and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, where the Titanic was built. The young man is on his way to New York for a holiday. Naturally, his fellow passengers on A deck are all rich or at least well connected, and most are real: Lord Melchett (Morgan’s 19-year-old buddy), Lord Astor and his bride, Lord and Lady Duff Gordon, a Frick, a Vanderbilt, Mr and Mrs Straus ...”

“... cover Paris and Oxford in the 1920s, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the postwar New York art scene, the Biafran War, and even an unlikely association with a British affiliate of the Baader-Meinhof gang. Mountstuart publishes a number of books, contracts a number of marriages and meets just about everyone worth meeting. Anthony Powell and Henry ...”