“... and Paleolithic humans before getting back to Athens and Rome, to Florence, Bruges, Paris and New York. If the class is labelled ‘Art since 1945’, the teleological march will begin in medias res: aesthetic concerns and world-historical events predating the war will be lost in the primordial soup and only a few giant patriarchs will ...”

“... would require censoring. Chinese censors usually target large foreign news outlets such as the New York Times, the BBC, the Economist, or the Wall Street Journal, and leave academics in peace. The New York Times is blocked in both its English and Chinese versions by the Great Firewall of China (the world’s most infamous ...”

“... New York – contrary to popular opinion and Frank Sinatra – is never a city that doesn’t sleep. It sleeps soundly in fact. You walk the streets on certain nights and suddenly you can feel quite alone under the buildings. It’s not that the place is deserted, there are things going on – taxi-cabs, homeless people, late-night walkers, the police – but they can seem to proceed at that hour like things out of step, like odd yearnings of the imagination, or unexpected items in a gasoline-smelling dream of urban ruin ...”

“... the rejection of Modernism, ‘the impoverishment of national culture’, as the admired Peter Ackroyd calls it, dominate the final section. But the period has its heroes, and Appleyard’s choices of hero seem to coincide with those of Ackroyd: they are J.H. Prynne, ‘the most comprehensively gifted of living British poets’, and, on loan from New ...”

“... add: ‘Why did gold become money in the first place?’ Or: ‘Will gold ever be money again?’ Peter Bernstein’s history of gold as money is very much better at answering the first question than the other two. Pecuniary anthropology is very, very perilous. In the absence of evidence, both Aristotle and Adam Smith made implausible conjectures about the ...”

“... gimmicks designed purely to upset people.’Throughout his career in pop, as manager of the New York Dolls, the Sex Pistols and Bow Wow Wow, and then as an unlikely recording artist himself, McLaren continually insisted that ideas were more important than music. Publicity and presentation could be an art form in their own right. McLaren liked to claim that ...”

“... of the announcement: ‘I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend.’ For the older generation, Princess Margaret was the unlucky princess. She was our Diana: capricious, passionate, vindictive, doomed to fall in love with rotters, the breakaway royal who hung out with actors and rogues and who was frozen out by ...”

“... from the cold, he thought that just such a wind had blown … in the time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression – all these had existed, did ...”

“... together by James T. Como, a Professor of Rhetorical Communication in the City University of New York. He tells us in an introduction: ‘Now several societies exist for the purpose of studying Lewis’s thoughts; film rights to several of his books have been purchased, and filmed documentaries of his life have been produced; both popular and scholarly books ...”

“... typically disembarked at Philadelphia but then settled a broad arc of territory from central New York down through the Carolina back-country. The ‘remarkable mixture of peoples’ that captured the imagination of Crèvecoeur and so many later commentators was an 18th-century phenomenon. Culture and institutions, though, demand thicker description than ...”

“... himself with Hopper’s spinster sister and had the run of the family house in Nyack, New York, where the pictures were stored. In 1976 the Whitney Museum hired me to study the bequest, organise exhibitions and write a catalogue of Hopper’s work. I collected letters, interviews with Hopper and his wife, exhibition checklists and reviews, theatre ...”

“... of colour, like those vengeful district attorneys burning him at the stake in the courts of New York and Georgia, or the journalists who laughed when he said he was the greatest president for Blacks since Lincoln.Don has always been a Las Vegas kinda guy, with his showgirls and gold-plated toilets, a long-running joke in New ...”

“... the beginning and end of trading each day was even marked by the ringing of a bell. But the New York Stock Exchange doesn’t have an image of the Virgin Mary painted on the wall. The painting in Orsanmichele appeared overnight, out of nowhere, on one of the loggia’s piers shortly after construction finished in 1290. The Madonna had long been associated ...”

“... Certainly, to read a collection like The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse, newly-edited by Iona and Peter Opie, is to be reminded of the powerful appeal that’s made in poetry by ‘the kind of story in which, you want to know what happens next’. The Opies’ choice is often cautious and occasionally perverse. In some respects, moreover, their book belongs ...”

“... useful objects respected like artworks. Blades, chisels, axes, boots, helmets, guns. The actor Peter Coyote remembers Joanne Kyger laughing about ‘how much stuff Gary had to store so that he could go off to Japan and live simply’. The novice monk insisted that his future wife clear her credit-card debt, which had climbed to $1000, before she travelled ...”