“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... do not even bother to refute me.’ It’s all a little too like the exchange in Casablanca when Peter Lorre’s character says to Humphrey Bogart’s: ‘You despise me, don’t you?’ To which Bogart replies: ‘If I gave you any thought, I probably would.’ Last year there was a series of more distressing revelations, about the ties of North American ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... least one copy is available on eBay for $14.95: ‘Great for framing’). At a rally in New York the same year, Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum compared the Biafrans’ plight to that of Jews in Nazi Germany. John Lennon returned his MBE as a protest against the UK’s support of the federal government. Martin Amis, then a university student, was shocked to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... did Chagall really belong ‘among the very great artists of our time’, as the museum curator Peter Selz thought, or was he, as Arthur Danto puts it, ‘overproductive, repetitive and shallow’? Naive, or a self-consciously calculating opportunist? The canny ‘manager of his own fairyland’ (Jean Cassou), or a painter who carefully cultivated his image ...”

“... always an apple, a nut and a shiny new penny.’ Despite living for many years in London and New York (and marrying Tina Brown), Evans has retained an agreeable touch of puzzled or even prudish innocence: ‘the effing and blinding that is the vernacular today’ was unknown in his family. Perhaps he doesn’t realise just how interesting he is in this ...”

“... in 1991. Joseph Heller called it a ‘sizzler’ and Michiko Kakutani announced in the New York Times that Gates had ‘established himself as a novelist of the very first order’. The Times profiled him too: ‘“Beckett is my main man,” Mr Gates says in his office at Newsweek magazine, where he writes about music and books … He is, he ...”

“... in the 1960s, by which time she was in her eighties, and living with her sister in Katonah, New York State. Had Apollinaire ‘behaved’ himself, Padgett tactfully inquired, to which she responded: ‘He was a perfect gentleman.’ Alcools collected more than a decade of poems, and is accordingly somewhat uneven. Its inclusiveness does, however, mean that ...”

“... are there no great women artists?’ was first put to Linda Nochlin in 1970 by the New York gallerist Richard Feigen. It was a genuine inquiry. He would love, he said, to show women artists. The problem was he couldn’t find any good enough. Stumped for an answer at the time, Nochlin continued to consider the question. Her response came a year ...”

“... had engaged Stead as his secretary. William Blech – Bill Blake as he was to become – was a New York Jew, autodidact, intellectual, Marxist, and investments manager of a grain firm then operating out of London. When Blake learned, from a disdainful remark of Duncan’s, that his secretary thought herself a writer, he asked to see a sample of her work. Next ...”

“... is familiar from mythological literature. Alison Lurie, praising the Harry Potter books in the New York Review of Books, saw in them ‘the common childhood fantasy that the dreary adults and siblings you live with are not your real family, that you are somehow special and gifted’. Freud called this the Family Romance and argued for its utility in defining ...”

“... Boublil and Schönberg, have pounced on the story of Martin Guerre, and Verlaine, Georg Trakl and Peter Handke, not to mention a dozen playwrights and film-makers, have taken up the tale of Kaspar Hauser. These days the celebrity machine has taken over the translation business: Bottom’s dream is acted out on Big Brother. But the allure of the old style ...”

“... been looking in the suitcase, I’ve been consulting other sources: my father’s younger brother, Peter, now a robust 86; family photographs; stamp albums; public records; other people’s suitcases; books; barely legible notes despatched to me by my mother, who has a macular hole and a keen memory and styles herself ‘Research Department’ – the kind of ...”