“... anti-Communist, now an aged relic of the Hoover Institution). No one then called them the New York intellectuals, as they have since become, and no one, except the dashing and iconoclastic Fred Dupee (who had their number quite early on), even hinted to me that the Congress for Cultural Freedom was in effect a part of the CIA. I published my first ...”

“... true. The Mahler symphonies now occupy the dead centre of the repertory. This past season, in New York, Carnegie Hall put on the Ninth on a Sunday, the Third the following Thursday, and, about a week later, on successive evenings, Das Lied von der Erde and the First. One loud night in February, the Second and Fourth were done simultaneously, at Carnegie and ...”

“... the same men continued to pay good money to see her feeble dancing, in Paris and Munich, in New York, Sacramento and San Francisco. There was pleasure to be had in the poorness of her performance: ‘The crowd, almost exclusively of the masculine gender, was immense; and they had a merry time of it, for the failure of the great attraction was so complete ...”

“... rewarded at the Restoration with the lucrative post of Treasurer to the household of the Duke of York. At one stage he was actively involved in the suppression of conventicles. Though it is not impossible that Apsley, according to Marvell ‘leader of the drinking crew in the commons’, might have nurtured the convictions of the writer of Order and Disorder ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”