“... Both authors have moved on. Rushdie, seduced by the high-definition celebrity culture of New York, new smells, brighter lights, has denounced his old midden for its failure to fire his imagination, but Moorcock, in whatever exile he finds himself, returns obsessively to his dream-source, the city of his birth. Mother London, a book whose reputation ...”

“... living together and sometimes apart, and each of them with lovers.Luke had an older brother, Peter, whom both Luke and I idealised in absentia. Peter had left behind a collection of 1960s Marvel comics in sacrosanct box files. These included a nearly complete run of The Fantastic Four, the famous 102 issues drawn by ...”

“... the left, catches up, comes alongside the car. The screen goes dark again and a title says, ‘New York, 1970’. Now we get a view of the moving car from the front, outside the windscreen, the camera slightly off to the driver’s left. Ray Liotta, looking young and spruce but tired, is at the wheel, his face well lit. Robert de Niro, in the passenger ...”

“... is at present something of a fashion for novels reflecting other novels, ironically and obliquely (Peter Ackroyd’s The Great Fire of London comes to mind, with Little Dorrit behind it; or even Flaubert’s Parrot, though biography, fiction and all inform that eccentric piece of writing). These, at best, are neither extensions nor offshoots, but playful and ...”

“... keep a sizeable library in my locker (though my reading was not as highbrow as my fellow historian Peter Burke’s during his stint as a pay clerk in Singapore, which in a typical two days, Vinen tells us, included Galileo, Gide and Rimbaud). Although subject to weekly parades and periodic kit inspections, we were excused weapon training and most other ...”

“... A Practical Guide for Women by the punctuation-crazed Rita Freedman. Publishing houses in New York, busy, as usual, looking for the hot new writing talent, will expect to find it in the medical journals and at psychoanalytic conferences, such is the demand for quasi-medical books which tell you how to deal with life’s crapness. In the same way, editors ...”

“... theory and towards the frontiers being opened up by drugs and neurotransmitters. In 1959 Peter Tripp, a radio DJ in New York, decided to stay awake for two hundred hours to raise money for charity. Tripp set himself up in a glass booth in Times Square, monitored by sleep researchers, where he rapped and span ...”

“... had fabulous orange juice at that hotel.LeonieShe has one drooping eyelid and lives with Uncle Peter beside a big shallow lake. To swim you walk out miles. She tells me I had written all the lyrics of Joni Mitchell songs and in her dream sang them to her. Uncle Peter, once an architect, wears colour co-ordinated shirt ...”

“... I’d called an old friend, a photographer, James, who was with a bunch of colleagues from the New York Times in a farmhouse nearby. He’d said they could probably make room. So I call him again and he gives us directions. We find them a few minutes later, sitting on benches round a marble-topped table in a brightly lit courtyard, tapping away at ...”

“... leg of X or the endangered toe of Y, who has already lost a leg? Those are two of the variations Peter Singer puts forward on the exam question that used to ask whether, in a fire of just such severity as to let you rescue one and no more, you would plump for your grandparent, your grandchild or the Titian that so surprisingly shared houseroom with them. His ...”

“... the notes into the till. On other occasions the reporter flew first-class with his wife to New York for a New Year party and spent £10,000 in one day on furnishings. He spent £140,000 on restoring a yacht. He rented a gallery in central Hamburg as his personal museum. At one time or another he had been trusted with most of the £2,500,000 in bank notes ...”

“... until they were discredited in 1964, after massive crop failures). During the Sixties, in New York City, twins put up for adoption were separated and used for psychological studies under the direction of Peter Neubauer, who never told either them or their parents that they were twins, or that they were being studied. In ...”

“... in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. Khachaturian isn’t let off the hook either: ‘He called it a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with ...”

“... on Iran, David Petraeus gave some unsolicited advice to Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times. Trump, he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordering him to dismantle Iran’s uranium enrichment programme or face ‘the complete destruction of your country and your regime and your people’. If Khamenei were to ...”

“... not doubt that Mr McGregor, had he been blessed with children, would have read them The Tale of Peter Rabbit; and it is not hard to imagine someone still smiling over the enchanting Mrs Tittlemouse as they set a mousetrap. Why should we find it surprising that an art-lover in 1790 or so, who wept at a picture of an undernourished, ragged child gathering ...”