“... entered the war he was consigned to the tedium of the navy’s cable and censorship office in New York. Donovan rescued him from that backwater at the end of 1943 and sent him to monitor OSS’s Balkan operations, which were directed from Istanbul. OSS Istanbul was running an apparently successful espionage network, Operation Dogwood, but its ...”

“... Men and The Final Days, the first made into a well-known movie. Bernstein went to New York and wrote a book about the papacy, but he became a bit of a joke among journalist colleagues for taking his success too seriously.Woodward turned to the comedian John Belushi and another kind of fall: tragic early death. He wrote books about the CIA and the ...”

“... if you were a coastal American, you might get a vast informational department store like the New York Times, the Washington Post or the LA Times, but the great cities in between had their equivalents, from the Chicago Tribune to the Arizona Republic. If you were British, you might buy one of this country’s bitterly competitive national counterparts, such ...”

“... impelled by her upbringing to become a socialist, and even to pass on the contagion to her son – Peter Benenson, founder of Amnesty International. Her book moves from the site of her father’s first oilfield to the site of her reforming achievements at Marks and Spencer. ‘What were my qualifications?’ she asks in her foreword. ‘A Russian soul, a ...”

“... Renaissance interest in the occult. One of the outstanding papers at this conference was that of Peter Burke, who may stand here as a representative of a much wider group of historians now increasingly concerned with the recovery of popular culture. That group is disparate, its motives no less so. The concept of sections of society ‘hidden from ...”

“... novel contains tasty-sounding recipes, to add verisimilitude.) To say she is ‘too New York’ is just ‘a cute way of being anti-semitic’ – but then, in Washington, even the Jews behave like gentiles. Mrs Feldman goes for comfort to her group therapy session, with the other Washington hostesses, but a mugger follows her and strips all the ...”

“... those supercooled, Stygian tempi. By explaining the earlier development of Klemperer’s art, Peter Heyworth’s biography places the notorious aspects of its last phase in a proper perspective, and restores balance to a reputation which has become, in England at any rate, lopsided. It teaches us, for example, that Klemperer’s tempi were not always ...”

“... begun to fasten on two prognostications of impending global doom, one by Felix Rohatyn in the New York Review of Books, the other by Peter Jay and Michael Stewart. It is perhaps too easy to mock Apocalypse 2000 as being full of Oxford PPE clevernesses, and some of its predictions (e.g. the maintenance of military rule in ...”

“... bad: there were gymnasia, a theatre, inscriptions in Greek. Imagine an habitué of London or New York being exiled to – insert your preferred provincial town here – and being told that the local art gallery has some surprisingly good works. Similarly, scholars sometimes say that the unpleasantness of its climate and setting is greatly exaggerated by ...”

“... true that some modern art has imitated the primitive energy, the folk spells, of graffiti. Peter Fuller’s Modern Painters, a quarterly ‘journal of the fine arts’, launched last spring, challenges many of the fashionable practices and assumptions which I have just reviewed. At first, its opponents in the art world said it wouldn’t last, then ...”

“... which took place on a set that looked like a stone and steel cage, described by co-director Peter Hall as a metaphor for ‘the mechanism of power’ at the core of the histories. I cannot describe how irritated – oppressed might be closer – I felt by the way the audience at the Donmar was held across the road until summoned and marched by ...”

“... domestic linens, needlepoint, embroidered handkerchiefs, scraps of tapestries brought to New York after her father’s death. ‘Having held onto these objects of clothing for a lifetime,’ her assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, wrote shortly before her death, ‘by incorporating them into her art she alleviates her fear of separation. This processing is ...”

“... writing a series on Freud’s life for Canadian TV, a musical about Trotsky’s 1917 stay in New York and an end-of-the-world disaster movie. A little earlier he worked on Jesus of Nazareth for RAI and ITC. After telling us of all his advance reading (including ‘the New Testament in Greek ... to get a fresh look at it’) he tells us: ‘I had to remake ...”

“... gay couple (or artistic couple of any sexual stripe), as celebrated as the earlier musical duo Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, though they rigorously resist all efforts by the gay community to assimilate them. When Farson asked them for details of their sex life, George became vehement: ‘That’s part of a different story. Not part of the G–G ...”

“... agreed to a ceasefire after eleven days of fighting, but the days of ‘quiet’ – as the New York Times tellingly describes the last seven years, in which Israel intensified its domination over the Palestinians with impunity – are over. Dead, too, is Trump’s plan to bypass the Palestinian question through ‘normalisation’ between Israel and Arab ...”