“... into my screensaver file: a tiny head shot clipped from Newsweek; two that had appeared in the New York Times; another printed alongside Allan Gurganus’s obituary in the Advocate, a glossy American gay and lesbian mag usually devoted to pulchritudinous gym bunnies, gay sitcom stars and treatments for flesh-eating strep. It seemed the least I could do for the ...”

“... plays their author had known as The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, Richard Duke of York and All Is True, for example, reappeared as, respectively, Henry VI Parts 2 and 3 and Henry VIII.) Pre-Christian British kings, however, though just as solemnly vouched for by ...”

“... in Holocaust Studies; hardly a day goes by without a Holocaust-related story appearing in the New York Times. Polls show that many more Americans can identify the Holocaust than Pearl Harbor or the atomic bombing of Japan. Consider the media attention given to Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, published in 1996 and hailed as Time’s ...”

“... from tabloid libraries: Freddie Mills posing in his trunks (low angle, hard shadows), the murdered Peter Arne (in a blizzard of newsprint dots), Charles Hawtrey having a very bad hair day after a house fire in Deal. Seabrook loves the reforgotten, the misrepresented. None of his heroes will be acknowledged in The Oxford Companion to English Literature ...”

“... over, he says no. There is a fabled long version of Apocalypse Now – almost six hours – which Peter Cowie reports on in his lively and compendious The Apocalypse Now Book, from which I have taken many of the quotations in this piece, although I also learned a lot from Eleanor Coppola’s Notes (1979), and from Fax Bahr’s documentary Hearts of Darkness ...”

“... for Living that it was considered unproducible on the London stage in 1933 and was put on in New York instead. The extramarital heterosexual relationships are openly discussed, the homosexual love between Otto and Leo before Gilda arrived strongly implied. ‘I know all about that!’ she says. ‘I came along and spoiled everything!’ Coward’s first ...”

“... of all a sort of symbiotic state of the poet’. Others were less tolerant. The short story writer Peter Taylor, also Jarrell’s close friend, remembered him at Vanderbilt as treating almost everybody badly, from arrogance rather than conceit. Another student recalled that he was preternaturally bright, and ‘knew everything’. Those who know too much are ...”

“... American style’, the style of the new sculpture gallery in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Pope was subsequently chosen as the architect of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and was also responsible for the design of the Duveen Gallery for the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum (not, as Spalding claims, destroyed in the Second World War ...”

“... must have been Edwina H. Wilson’s Her name was Wallis Warfield, for it was published, in New York, in December 1936, before the issue was decided. (‘Suppose – just suppose – an American girl should become Queen of England!’) The volume is worth looking at, for it sets the style of much that has been written since, and the tone is of an ...”

“... responsibility was divided in three ways: Deedes edited the opinion pages; the appalling Peter Eastwood, the news pages; while Lord Hartwell played the grand old Duke of York. The Deedes/Eastwood duo was essentially a ‘Mr Nice and Mr Nasty’ set-up, and up to a point Deedes was successful in his role. He soothed ...”

“... night for two years and recorded their conversations – but by Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian, three pranksters who may or may not have ever visited a Hooters but who became internet famous, and soon afterwards New York Times famous, for their comprehensive ridiculing of the standards of editing and ...”

“... prove that success in the movies is never any guarantee of success. He was born in 1970 (just as Peter Bogdanovich was shooting The Last Picture Show) and he is already, in 2008, gathering force as a cautionary tale. Putting careers and heartaches to one side, it is true that the anatomy of failure may be more culturally informative than the naming of ...”

“... with a group of works made in 2007-8, a few years after Davis arrived in Los Angeles from New York, where he had cut short his studies at the Cooper Union, frustrated by the emphasis on conceptual training over painting as process. ‘I left school because it wasn’t teaching me anything,’ he later said. ‘It shouldn’t be an either/or battle between ...”

“... Martin Chuzzlewit, in the Dickens novel, crosses the Atlantic in a packet boat. When it reaches New York, newsboys come aboard shouting out the latest in their papers: the New York Sewer, the Stabber, the Plunderer and so on. ‘Here’s the Sewer’s exposure of the Washington gang,’ one cries, ‘and the Sewer’s exclusive account of a flagrant act of dishonesty committed by the Secretary of State when he was eight years old, now communicated, at a great expense, by his own nurse ...”

“... national hero Charles Lindbergh. He’d been ‘beloved’ to her when he’d flown solo from New York to Paris; but he’d taken to headlining rallies to defend the Neutrality Act against the ‘British and Jewish races’ who would ‘lead our country to destruction’. He was the American Thompson most feared, ‘America’s number one problem ...”