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“... 2012 Olympics. Is New York in denial or is it simply entering another stage of what the historian Max Page sees as a continuous process of creative destruction, refusing to let any obstacle block its path? Thomas Bender and Mike Davis are two of America’s leading urban scholars. Bender is a cultural historian known for his accounts of the intellectual and ...”

“... involvement in the Egyptian economy steadily increased: the American economist Henry Carter Adams believed the commission was so powerful it was becoming the ‘practical dictator of Egypt’. This exercise of ‘soft’ imperialism led to a nationalist rebellion, British military intervention and the creation of a ‘veiled protectorate’ in ...”

“... of B-movie film noirs, with money from the producer Ed Pressman, the computer millionaire Max Palevsky and Malick himself. It was based on the story of a Nebraska hoodlum called Charles Starkweather (Martin Sheen), who in 1957 killed the father of 14-year-old Caril Ann Fugate (Sissy Spacek, 23 at the time), and then took off with her on the lam across ...”

“... but a meteor had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid,’ Henry Adams wrote in his autobiography (1907): ‘All the new forces, condensed into corporations, were demanding a new type of man – a man with ten times the endurance, energy, will and mind of the old type.’ When O’Neill finally emerged on the scene in ...”

“... He sieved biographies, letters and accounts of those he considered great men – whether John Adams or Confucius – to produce poems with distinct overtones of hero-worship. In politics this tendency led to his admiration for Mussolini, and even to that view of Hitler as ‘a Saint’. While caged in Pisa in the closing days of the war, he set to work on ...”

“... in the Montgolfier brothers’ balloon in 1783. Nature needed no exaggeration either. As Douglas Adams once said, ‘isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?’ That was in 1979 – but it was possible to think the same thing in 1579.There were many areas of religious ...”

“... displays that promiscuously mixed types of distinction, squeezing ballet dancers next to bishops. Max Beerbohm remembered going as a child to inspect the London Stereoscopic Company’s ‘great long double window on the eastern side of Regent Street’ and realising for the first time that his political heroes, read about in the papers and cartooned in ...”

“... first rented from the Vanderbilts. If she socialised with other expatriates like James and Henry Adams, she also moved in worlds familiar to Proust, the successive volumes of whose masterwork she read almost as soon as they appeared. The two never met – Wharton later implied, rather implausibly, that she deliberately avoided the encounter on the grounds ...”

“... if not hyperventilate, at some of the A-list names cropping up regularly in All We Know: Maude Adams (the first Peter Pan); the Russian film star Alla Nazimova (a teetering Salomé in the ultra-campy cinematic 1923 version of Wilde’s play); Isadora Duncan, the bisexual modern dancer; the interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe and her Broadway-producer lover ...”