“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sculptural possibilities of a new technology, shell concrete. (Saarinen’s TWA terminal in New York, a poor man’s Opera House, was then under construction.) Goossens and Moses had set the contest’s requirements. Although it has always been called the Opera House, in the singular, they called for two halls, one very big, for concerts and grand opera ...”

“... Liberty (bandoliers fetchingly draped round her ‘splendid body’), and a young ex-hippy New York Times reporter, Berny Holzheimer. Berny is untimely cut off, half-way through the last sentence of the narrative, killed, one assumes, by a Beirut sniper. Richard meanwhile has given up the struggle in the bush for a quieter life in Bush ...”

“... gangly Abraham Lincoln at union events and his subsequent employment on popular radio shows in New York City; his marriage to the fading Hollywood actress Eve Fine, and the dreadful combustion of that marriage in a series of mutual betrayals that lead to the exposure of Ira’s party membership and the publication of Eve’s tell-all memoir, entitled ‘I ...”

“... their past. Allison points to the environmental planning which has restricted development and, in Peter Hall’s phrase, ‘contained urban England’. Such restriction is in one sense costly – the price of land and population density have been raised – but it was a price well worth paying for the protection of a countryside unsurpassed in the ...”