“... Blair’s understanding? No, presumably, because of course this does not happen. 18 April. To New York for the opening of The History Boys. The plane is not full and unexpectedly comfortable but I miss the now archaic ritual of transatlantic flights in the days before videos and iPods: the coffee and pastries when you got on, the drinks and the lunch before ...”

“... prejudice took nerve. Similarly, he describes making a scene at the house of Brian Urquhart in New York, because a British UN official like Urquhart should not – whatever the merits of the case – have criticised the Eden invasion of Egypt in front of foreigners. This comes ill from a man who sneered ruthlessly at his own country while giving aid and ...”

“... obligatory references to dark, peripheral events like the Partitions of Poland or the reforms of Peter the Great – now fa1l into oblivion, not because they are incomplete but because they are distortions. Neither is this a matter of crude ‘equating’: of setting out to prove that the Counter-Reformation in Central Europe was as important as it was in ...”

“... Robert Haas, after a year’s deliberation, decided to go ahead with the publication, in New York, of Seven Gothic Tales. Putnam, the English publishers, had rejected the manuscript without even reading it. Haas had taken a gamble. In the event, Seven Gothic Tales was chosen as a ‘Book of the Month’ in the USA before publication. One cannot help ...”

“... has always been at hand to guide us through his development: the Southern Gothic phase; the New York phase; the confidant-to-criminals phase; and now, the Late Period. These latter two phases have involved not just rousing pre-publicity but also the trumpeting of a new aesthetic. In Cold Blood, an assiduous and at times brilliant work, came packaged as the ...”

“... is that of Dr Hans Küng of Tübingen University, about whom it was widely reported – in the New York Times, for example – that he had been forbidden to teach by the authorities in Rome and by his bishop. Had this indeed been the case, the massive response of sympathetic protest and indignation would have been both intelligible and warranted. But what in ...”

“... wreck its spontaneity. In Genius in the Drawing-Room Robert Rosenstone’s essay describes the New York salon of Mabel Dodge which ran (if that’s what salons do) from 1912 to 1914 and was ‘the most famous, and no doubt the most interesting salon in American history’. Mabel Dodge liked to assemble celebrities with common or overlapping interests, and she ...”

“... Ben Sanderson, played by Nicolas Cage, enters an exclusive Beverly Hills bar and approaches Peter Brackman, an agent he knows, to borrow a few dollars. Plainly worried about his reputation, Brackman gives Ben the money but adds: ‘I think it would be best if you didn’t contact me again.’ The reason Ben inspires such fear and hostility in his ...”

“... it’s Okwui Enwezor, Nigerian by birth (the first from Africa), now living between Munich and New York and previously artistic director of documenta, the Biennale’s more trendy, conceptual cousin in Kassel. Enwezor’s Biennale is called All the World’s Futures and there’s little optimistic or utopian about it. He believes we are living in dark ...”

“... William Yale, representative in the Middle East of the disreputable Standard Oil Company of New York (and so of American capitalism); Curt Prüfer, ardent German nationalist, working to seduce the Arabs to the German side, who was later a convert to ‘the beautiful ideas of National Socialism’; Aaron Aaronsohn, an agronomist who worked to make the ...”

“... and she married as soon as she could. Her first, unsatisfactory husband was a hearty New York agricultural statistician, whose main attraction was that he was ‘not at all religious so far as I could see’. To research his first books on farm economy they interviewed peasants around the country, with Pearl serving as her husband’s translator. At ...”

“... 1980s and 1990s, enjoining police to target minor offences and endorsed by Mayor Giuliani in New York, was eagerly taken up here by Jack Straw but has failed to make a lasting impact on crime in either country. Minton also looks into the Asbo system, dominant until recently in the social policing of Manchester and some other cities. The legislation which ...”

“... some curators of 20th-century art are much admired in the academy (the Museum of Modern Art in New York has had a string of such figures, from William Rubin to John Elderfield to Leah Dickerman). Today the more telling split is between modern and contemporary fields (the latter has no exact birthdate – 1970, 1980, 1989), but this is a schism less between the ...”

“... of Shadows, though very readable and clear in detail, lacks the overall narrative clarity of Peter Hopkirk’s studies of the subject, most notably The Great Game (1990). The essential truth about Anglo-Russian rivalry in Asia is that, despite the imperialist fantasies entertained by some of the Game’s players, there was never all that much at ...”

“... argued that that a second resolution would be required – as had the attorney general, Sir Peter Goldsmith. Tony Blair himself had tried to secure a second resolution. But then, just as the negotiations for a second resolution – handled by Greenstock – failed, the attorney general changed his view, declaring that Resolution 1441 itself revived the ...”