“... crisis, the local husbands dutifully take the commuter train to Manhattan; when they return, they blow smoke rings of marijuana and praise the economic theories of Milton Friedman. ‘America rose and fell on the melodies of New Canaan’s songs about the economy. Songs sung by a Jewish economist and mimicked by Wasps who would have thought twice before ...”

“... passages of reconstruction, of supposition, of – let us spit the word out – fiction. Like Simon Schama he is dealing in ‘dead certainties’ and ‘unwarranted speculations’. But within the text the line is clearly drawn. The critic cannot claim to be confused. On the afternoon of 29 February, John Williams and the other Deerfield prisoners were ...”

“... first émigré period’. Even more damagingly, Field has evidently been forbidden to quote from Simon Karlinsky’s edition of The Nabokov-Wilson Letters (1979), thus fatally impoverishing his account of the author’s most important literary relationship. (Karlinsky, incidentally, has his little say about Field’s ‘enormous blunders’ in the preface to ...”

“... their opponents. The most immediate result was the mass exodus of scientists to other countries, a blow from which German science has never recovered. Individuals such as Arnold Schoenberg, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, along with cultural institutions like the Frankfurt School and the Bauhaus, benefited the countries to which they fled, leaving Germany a ...”

“... century’s end. It is impossible to think of Sibelius’s music as in any way factitious, despite Simon Parmet’s claim that he used Golden Section proportions, just as Bartók and Debussy are supposed to have done. A certain amount of number-working is inherent to composition. What Sibelius demonstrates is that it was possible to write significant music in ...”

“... Korda snapped of the bereted Che Guevara at a memorial service for the victims is hard to avoid.Simon Hall’s Ten Days in Harlem is a lively account of Castro’s charm offensive in September 1960 when he visited New York again, this time to address the United Nations General Assembly. It was a sensitive moment for all concerned: Castro’s revolution was ...”

“... one of the characters in The Ice Storm imagines herself plunged by ‘a slight warp in her Paul Simon album’ into ‘a bottomless pit of loneliness beside which even Cambodia paled’, you take the point about well-heeled self-indulgence in the face of South-East Asian suffering without losing sight of her genuine isolation. Years later, though, Moody ...”

“... practice. It is as if we had only the lyrics, without recordings or melodies, of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Joan Baez – and those only in indifferent Portuguese translations. Most of their power and all of their subtlety would vanish. For similar reasons, the troubadours have more often been honoured as cultural pioneers than admired as ...”

“... invited Moon to the White House, where the two men prayed together. Nixon’s fall was a grievous blow to Moon, who immediately set out on a campaign of extreme right-wing agitation to reverse what he saw as the decline into leftism inaugurated by Watergate. The Moonie newspaper, Rising Tide, played a key role in these years in rallying the disparate elements ...”

“... gods. Attempting a Tempest/Macbeth double bill at the Kennedy Center, the 65-year-old protagonist, Simon Axler, ‘the last of the best of the classical American stage actors’, is suddenly abandoned by his talent. No reason is given – there is no reason – and Axler suffers a breakdown, aggravated by his inability to believe even in the sincerity of his ...”

“... some form of public representation was inescapable and her disfigurement by smallpox – a great blow, thought contemporaries, to her husband’s career – made her painted image particularly difficult and painful for her. That she used exotic costume not merely as a flattering distraction from her ruined face but as a positive way of re-inventing ...”

“... in idiom, too much sex – and the work was roundly condemned in Pravda. It was a substantial blow, but even as his colleagues dutifully criticised the opera in public, the Soviet arts boss Platon Kerzhentsev was responding warmly to his pleas for help in regaining official favour (while at the same time assuring the Politburo that Shostakovich had ...”

“... change in his attitude towards his own experience’. The change was a matter of learning how to blow up real events and people to mythic proportions. It was Cassady who taught him this: the tear-away adventurer who stole cars and carried off women at a dizzying pace appeared to be more than human. The poetic tropes with which Kerouac limned his ...”

“... after his early winning streak, as each new play bombed, he underwent public whippings. John Simon called Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer and Sweet Bird of Youth ‘cowardly’, and, in 1978, wrote: ‘The kindest thing to assume is that Williams died shortly after completing Sweet Bird of Youth, and that his subsequent, ever more dismal ...”

“... the 1970s, French democratic smugness came under fire from foreign historians. The most effective blow was dealt by the American Robert Paxton, whose Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order (1972) demolished the belief that the Vichy regime was an aberration. Vichy’s policies, Paxton argued, not least the deportation of more than seventy thousand Jews to Nazi ...”