“... 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 ...”

“... but by a romance set in Paris and then the roar of a prehistoric monster laying waste to New York. ‘I can still not be sure,’ Williams reflected, ‘what I took from that whole flow’ – aside, presumably, from a sharp urge to lie down. ‘Flow’ was the term Williams introduced in his column for the Listener at the turn of the 1970s to describe ...”

“... Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where, unknown to him, his high-life associate, the film-maker Peter Whitehead, had been taken, after suffering a heart attack. It was one of those mornings of indulgent sunshine, filtered through gauze. Lilies and bell-shaped purple flowers. Twigs. A long pine table which gave Marks plenty of elbow room to roll his herbal ...”

“... Rage and Betrayal, the highly prejudicial ABC programme of 12 April 1996, in which the newscaster Peter Jennings called McVeigh a ‘monster’ and cited passages from Pierce’s book. Parallels between bomb-making in The Turner Diaries and by McVeigh were made much of in Joseph Hartzler’s opening address to the jury. The only material evidence produced by ...”

“... Independence, to its rise in the Revolution. Both Melville’s grandfathers, Thomas Melvill and Peter Gansevoort, were Revolutionary heroes – Thomas for being among the Sons of Liberty who defied the colonial tax-gatherers in the Boston Tea Party in 1773, Peter for withstanding a British siege in 1777 (after which he ...”

“... of two of its largest groups. All of this happened on 3 December, which soon became known as New York publishing’s Black Wednesday. There had already been rumblings in the industry. Earlier in the year HarperCollins had put a stop to expense-account lunches. Jonathan Burnham, a senior vice president there, said that things had changed since he started in ...”

“... conditions there. She followed her brother to America in 1928, where her love for glittering New York made her hate herself. After reading Daughter of Earth, a novel by the radical journalist Agnes Smedley, she joined the American Communist Party. She returned to Germany just in time for the Wall Street Crash and, refusing financial help from her ...”

“... detail, so characteristic of Ingres, may prompt the visitor to the Metropolitan Museum in New York to wonder whether it was modesty which made Madame Leblanc decline to exhibit so very valuable a possession more ostentatiously in her portrait, or the painter’s reluctance to let sparkle distract from form in the centre of his painting. Readers of ...”

“... of recruiting the writer as a graduate assistant, ‘would you study the gospel with anyone but St Peter?’ – but also a lovable completism. At Yasnaya Polyana, an ‘International Tolstoy Scholar’ insists on sitting in a stream that Tolstoy used to bathe in, a stream now ‘partly obstructed, and full of vegetable life’. The scholar comes out ...”

“... it. The Modern American Novel is an ‘Opus Book’ (General Editors – Keith Thomas, Alan Ryan, Peter Medawar) intended for students. The Literature of the United States is a volume in the Macmillan History of Literature. But no Oxford undergraduate could get by with generalities like this aperçu of Professor Walker’s: ‘Jewish novels are ...”

“... ways of distilling herself. This was around the time she was attending the Actors Studio in New York, and just as you can see the effect of that study on her films (Bus Stop, The Prince and the Showgirl), you can see it in the portraits. With Sam Shaw at the beach in Amagansett, she looks pensive, sometimes worried, allowing the camera to see her ...”

“... which correspond to a little less than half of the published text: 44 per cent, according to Peter Davison’s estimate. These have now been published in an opulent edition: the right-hand pages of the book give a full-size photograph of the material, the left-hand pages contain Professor Davison’s transcription, laboriously deciphered, the cancellings ...”

“... pioneering work on early modern smells by Mark Jenner, a British historian at the University of York. But Muchembled’s guiding assumption, that human reactions to smells are not innate, but are shaped by experience, is as valid for England as it is for France. Our pleasure in smelling a rose and our disgust at some rotting piece of carrion are equally ...”

“... of the group of Methodist farming families from northern Yorkshire who sailed in the Duke of York for Nova Scotia, and notes how the wetland techniques necessary near the Yorkshire Derwent served them well in the marshlands of the Bay of Fundy. He makes mistakes, particularly on the Scottish setting. He is one of many historians who have obviously never ...”