“... an ogre to Zionists to this day. It was so slipshod and inaccurate that Thurston Clarke in the New York Times thought the most charitable speculation was that it had been ‘dictated but never read, neither by the former prime minister nor by his publishers’. After​ the brief and futile interlude of James Callaghan’s premiership, a new Tory prime ...”

“... than three million copies and was translated into a dozen languages. George ran for mayor of New York and finished ahead of Teddy Roosevelt, though behind the Tammany Hall candidate. Henry George Foundations still exist in London, Melbourne and his native Philadelphia. Liberal Democrats in Britain continue to hanker after George’s single land tax to ...”

“... him in America in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, which is more pungently caught in the oral biography Peter Manso produced in 1985, yet Lennon often puts his finger on the kind of detail that makes sense of Mailer’s character. Pearl Kazin (Alfred Kazin’s sister) was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar and her manner was said to be quite superior. She deployed it ...”

“... family would assemble for decades, and the year after a mansion in Bronxville (just north of New York City) where, he believed, they could escape Brahmin prejudice for good. In 1925, Kennedy dived into the movie business, cranking out low-budget ‘programme pictures’, tightening up costs and cultivating relations with the trade press. He successfully ...”

“... major museums and galleries; dealers sprang up to capitalise on the new popular interest. The New York Outsider Art Fair was established in 1993, and grows bigger every year.* Among the first of these discoveries – and still perhaps my favourite outsider figure – was A.G. Rizzoli (1896-1981), a shy San Francisco architectural draughtsman, who lived with ...”

“... axis of experience, if only one of several made available by verse. To set Sleeping rough beside Peter Robinson’s latest recension, This Other Life, is to recover a sense of the depths which belong to places which exist then as well as there. Robinson’s fidelity to life’s temporal infrastructure, its recessive inward distancings, is apparent in the ...”

“... aliens. (Nor is this particular combination confined to Los Angeles, as is illustrated by Peter Brimelow’s borrowing of the title of the 1988 science fiction film, Alien Nation, for the anti-immigrant tract he published seven years later.) Congresswoman Seastrand invokes Sodom and Gomorrah because ‘we probably have the most adulterers living here ...”

“... author (George Gilder), a leading radical economist (Tom Weisskopf) and the creator of Jaws (Peter Benchley). About a quarter of us had come to Harvard from one of ten famous boarding schools of the northeast, but about a half had attended public high schools across the country. With its massive endowments supporting extensive scholarships, Harvard had ...”

“... earlier, to when De Beers’s chairman, Harry Oppenheimer, first met with representatives of a New York-based ad agency to discuss how best to market diamonds to the American public, given the Depression’s effect on sales. You could describe the agency’s strategies, which included sponsoring lectures at selected high schools about the glamorous history of ...”

“... chequered life and surprisingly genial personality, has appeared since Mary McCarthy’s New York Review essay on Naked Lunch in 1963. Negative reviews throughout his career consistently missed the point. Partisans continue to generate reams of ephemera about ‘language virus’ and other notions he gave apocalyptic weight to, but seem as prone to ...”

“... as a lack of romance and took a slew of marriage proposals in her stride. Prince Albert, Duke of York was ‘quite a nice youth’ but he hardly stood out from the crowd. It seems to have been sheer determination that made Bertie, the stammering, nerve-racked and less than handsome second son of George V, persist in proposing to the woman he had ...”

“... The coincidence of the megasuccessful auction in London with the metafinancial disaster in New York is striking, and it makes a couple of things clear. First, while the markets burn the art world plays on, and London is now its undisputed capital. Second, even as titans fall, there are still lots of high rollers with money to burn on art, at least outside ...”

“... Fans of Andy Warhol’s Thirteen Most Wanted Men, the massive mugshots placed on the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, then quickly painted over by order of its commissioner, Robert Moses, might disagree on that last point.‘Myth and literature have imagined what can be neither known nor decided’ in law, so Heller-Roazen often ...”

“... at theatlasphere.com, which last January carried an ad for an Ayn Rand social evening at a New York City restaurant called Porter’s (the evening was to feature ‘gourmet hors d’oeuvres’ served by ‘uniformed strolling waiters’ and ‘an artistically decorated birthday cake’). Professional philosophers can join the Ayn Rand Society at ...”

“... let’s have us honey –‘It set the prosodic pattern,’ Berryman told the interviewer, Peter Stitt, who had been a student of his a few years earlier. The interview was conducted in a ward in St Mary’s Hospital in Minneapolis, where Berryman seemed to be comfortable. He spent quite a bit of time there during the last few years of his life. In ...”