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“... The second episode​ of season four of Mad Men opens in 1964, somewhere in New York State. Luxurious flakes of snow fall on a lot filled with flawless Christmas trees for sale, lit by strings of lights hung from red and white candy-striped poles. The camera swoops on a family of five, husband, wife and three children, arranged in perfect descending height order from left to right, husband Henry to little Bobby ...”

“... production of The Magic Flute (all of this under the auspices of the American director Peter Sellars). Robert Lowell meant to write a libretto and duly boned up with intensive attendance at the New York Met, but never delivered. John Ashbery has not, so far as I know, produced a libretto – only the ...”

“... Count Basie, Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong, beginning a lifelong fascination with New York.Ravi began taking small dance parts in the troupe’s productions, but his attention was increasingly drawn to the sitar. Back in Calcutta, now fourteen years old, he practised obsessively. The guru of gurus at the time was the sitarist Enayat Khan and Ravi ...”

“... the first inkling, but never in quite the same words. The drift was this. He had been out in New York one afternoon with his friend the writer George Mandel, when a sudden commotion stirred the crowd near the entrance to a store. Two people – kids he sometimes thought – were rushing towards the street, one urging on the other, calling back over his ...”

“... from Tucson or Albuquerque, on a wave-band still blanketed by the vociferous transmitters of New York. And perhaps this is just as well: for one shudders to anticipate the strenuously polemical ‘study’, perhaps to appear any day soon, that will see in any sympathetic concern with Spanish-speaking or pueblo cultures only some PR manoeuvre by the Reagan ...”

“... the perspective of an adult, and to assume that Gorey did too. Yet, as his occasional collaborator Peter Neumeyer remarked: ‘Of all the people I’ve known nobody has been less interested in children.’ He had no memory of Gorey ever even using the word ‘child’.What Gorey understood was not children, but the perspective of childhood and its lack of ...”

“... American Art’); the real ‘site’ is that provided by the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and the MIT Press, organs of the established order whose ‘discourse’ subsumes and defines that of the ‘artists’ it patronises. Mr Wallis’s own Introduction is part of this process: it can never have occurred to him that the very fact of providing ...”

“... inscrutable to the unipolar press that in 2003 overwhelmingly endorsed the Iraq War. From the New York Times and the New Yorker to CNN and MSNBC, nothing has changed in the mentality of the people who arrived at that verdict 15 years ago; and the next Democratic president, if there is one, will be under pressure to mount continuous threats against a nuclear ...”

“... writing in English, Buruma is known for his work on the Far Eastern Economic Review and in the New York Times, and as the author of A Japanese Mirror, a racy book on the Japanese underworld. God’s Dust, too, is somewhat breathlessly written as he moves us from Burma to Japan at almost breakneck speed, but it is a sensitive and rewarding book. He has an ...”

“... He was world-weary from the beginning. Nowhere was safe. Before he was 25 he declared New York to be a ‘giant snake pit’, Los Angeles to be ‘quel hole’. Naples was ‘crooked’, London ‘a dreary place’. Even Paris, ‘a divine city’, could be ‘colder than a nun’s cunt’. Once he had passed the quarter century he hit on Rome: ‘a beautiful city, really – though inhabited by a quarrelsome and cynical race ...”

“... while swords and skulls were shuffled into the background. See the title of the late Peter Foote’s The Viking Achievement (1970). Ferguson, though long based in Norway, was a pupil of Foote’s and although he early on declares an interest in restoring ‘the violence to the Viking Age’, his training still shows, notably at the end of Chapter ...”

“... His father, General Vladimir de Staël von Holstein, was vice-governor of the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul, where famous liberals had been incarcerated at the Tsar’s pleasure. His mother came from a more cultivated family, and was related to the composer Glazunov. At the outbreak of the Revolution in 1917, the family was compelled to leave ...”

“... the Czech Republic, was fired from his job at the branch of the fast-food chain Pret A Manger in York Way, by St Pancras Station, in the middle of September. He had been working there for two years. A statement on Pret’s website explains that he was ‘dismissed for misconduct’, having ‘made homophobic comments to a colleague’ in December 2011. Pret ...”

“... extent of supporting ‘moderately repressive regimes’ if they happen to be allies. Accordingly, Peter Stuart reported in the Christian Science Monitor of 29 January that Congressional hearings were likely to be scheduled on the ‘terms of the hostage release agreement...treatment of the hostages...embassy security’ and – as a kind of afterthought ...”

“... did that live? Djuna Barnes was born in 1892 in a log cabin on the Hudson River in upstate New York. She was the second in a seemingly endless line of bohemian children. Her father, ‘a misunderstood artistic genius’ according to his mother Zadel, never had a job until Zadel died when he was 53. Meanwhile, he did her proud by acting out their shared ...”