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“... itself an event – even without the BBC’s extraordinary graphics and the mobile enthusiasm of Peter Snow.’ Now, it’s not especially surprising that the deputy leader of a historic social-democratic party should open an article with a sentence that reads as if hastily translated from the Albanian, or that he should close that article without a single ...”

“... Wanda Landowska had done it on harpsichord and Rosalyn Tureck, little known outside New York, on piano): the piano music of Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninoff dominated the landscape. Gould instantly transformed the geography of pianism and with his capacity to deploy an almost verbal intelligence through his fingers – each knowing how to act ...”

“... Anthony Hecht and Susan Sontag, and aimed primarily at a circle of readers in London and New York. (He has evidently succeeded in that aim: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has just bestowed on him its ‘Genius Award’ – $250,000 with no strings attached.) Edward Kamau Brathwaite is also familiar with that circle, having carried off ...”

“... be avoided if one changes the question from an analytical one to a historical one. Six years ago, Peter Flora and Arnold Heidenheimer’s The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America shifted attention away from the conditions of the Seventies to the possible origins of those conditions over the course of the 20th century.2 Douglas Ashford’s The ...”

“... essayists and tellers of unpopular truths, and now, spurred by the appearance four years ago of Peter Davison’s marvellously thorough complete edition of Orwell’s writings (and no doubt with an eye on Orwell’s centenary, which falls this year), he has written a short book entirely devoted to telling us, as the title of the US edition has it, ‘Why ...”

“... to think about leaving in 1935; in 1938, six weeks before Kristallnacht, they sailed for New York. Two things stand out from Stern’s story. The first is his chilling conclusion that, had Hitler died in the summer of 1936, before the Holocaust and the devastations of war, he would today be hailed in Germany as a hero. Bread and circuses, roughly ...”

“... American-owned. At the same time, when speaking to the Securities and Exchange Commission in New York, Murdoch stresses that his company, News Corp, is Australian, and hence liable to different rules over accountancy standards (which are more flexible in Australia) and tax. Tax. There’s a thing. Murdoch, or rather News Corp, doesn’t pay much of it. In ...”

“... could use the American military to promote its values. The subtitle of The Good Fight (2006) by Peter Beinart, the then editor of the New Republic, insisted ‘Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again’. ‘It’s time to think of torture,’ Newsweek declared a few weeks after 9/11. ‘Focused ...”

“... his or her work. They went to Athens to profile Katina Paxinou, to the Metropolitan Opera in New York to observe Rudolf Bing in the post that had been his life’s ambition. John Whiting talked about The Devils from a café table in Loudon. And then, of course, there were the young directors whom Wheldon fostered: John Schlesinger, Ken Russell, David ...”

“... ungainly, emotional shambles of a man – lives in a small, blighted town in upstate New York. When we meet him, he has moved all the way from being a distributor of vending-machine candy to a hack reporter for the Mockingburg Record, a rag that specialises in ‘fawning anecdotes of local business people’. He marries, drowning in ‘witless ...”

“... first unsuccessful novel out the window of a bus, Thompson made a couple of mad-dash trips to New York, hastily typed out some opening chapters and a plot summary, and with the help of Woody Guthrie, sold Now and on Earth in 1941. But despite a few good reviews – and two more books published over the next decade – Thompson didn’t hit his novelistic ...”

“... again, with Waugh’s own report of the dire disorder which overtook Graham Greene in a New York hotel, when his lap began filling with blood. Had he, too, burst? Well, not exactly; there’s an explanation of sorts on page 106. At one point, the two teases fall out. Mitford, who is writing pieces about France for Ian Fleming at the Sunday Times (at a ...”

“... might have shared the wretched fate of his ambassador, bundled onto a Soviet freighter in New York for home, and the mercies of the KGB. The pattern didn’t change until the Sixties, when we began to breed our own moles. Mr Brook-Shepherd chronicles three prime Soviet specimens: first, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who probably supplied the information which ...”

“... book. Mailer was angry, says The Face, and he was spoiling for a fight. What is it with these New York lit-celebs? A year or two ago, Gore Vidal published a book-length essay of complaint in the Spectator after his new volume of essays had been underhailed by the London reviewers. Again, I was named among the guilty men and Vidal’s tone, like ...”

“... got where it is today. Fishermen have threatened to kill Homero Aridjis. Last year, in the New York Times, he explained that, as head of the environmental lobby, the Group of 100, he has condemned the slaughter of dolphins in Mexican tuna nets. ‘Criticising the slaughter is unpatriotic,’ he wrote. ‘The dolphin, after all, has no country, belonging to ...”