“... 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 ...”

“... sitting on a park bench, wearing a flat cap and a raincoat buttoned up to the neck, listening to Peter Cook. I was drawn in, however, almost against my will. Cathcart points out that we are less interested in the weather than we are supposed to be. While British people do talk about the weather, he says, that does not mean they care about it. I think it goes ...”

“... were made to help as many as possible readjust to their new lives. There were success stories: Peter Lorre and Billy Wilder roomed together to save money before breaking into Hollywood. Those who encountered mere indifference or who had to take jobs well below their professional competence were also by and large the lucky ones. The House Committee on ...”

“... Kirstein’s report on his conducting of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake at the New York Met in 1949: ‘Marvellous music, exquisitely played by Lambert, a divine conductor, the greatest ballet man in the business.’ Lambert had ‘a genius for tempi,’ Kirstein thought, ‘absolutely on the note in every variation; no boring bits; and he ...”

“... islet is crammed with men: Chief Vorstenbosch, Deputy Melchior van Cleef, Dr Marinus, Senior Clerk Peter Fischer, Junior Clerk Ponke Ouwehand, Arie Grote, Piet Baert, Ivo Oost, Wybo Gerritszoon. Their conversation is as cacophonous as their names. For instance: ‘most of us hands gather of an evenin’ in my humble billet, eh, for a little hazard ...”

“... Transposition of what? Foster begins his book with the pronouncement of the architects Alison and Peter Smithson: ‘Today we collect ads.’ For the first Pop artists this was an article of faith. Avid bottom-feeders, they scraped up regular doses of tabloid violence and pulp pornography, raiding the corner shop for its comic books and scouring flea markets ...”

“... in 1936, I saw that mightiest of zeppelins, the Hindenburg, floating above the skyscrapers of New York – a leviathan nearly as long as the Titanic, and as ill-starred. If Dr Goebbels had had his way the Hindenburg would have been called the ‘Hitler’ and would have borne an enormous swastika on its side, but Hugo Eckener, the man who gave substance to ...”

“... soon as it was clear that the unthinkable had become a cold reality, Paul Krugman asked in the New York Times whether the US was now a failed state. Political scientists who normally study American democracy in splendid isolation are starting to turn their attention to Africa and Latin America. They want to know what happens when authoritarians win elections ...”

“... Gott recalled in an article for the Guardian in 2006. He even made the front page of the New York Times on 17 January under the headline ‘RADICAL’s campaign threatens MARGIN of labour in britain’. Anthony Lewis, the journalist from the Times, had accompanied Gott one morning as he braved ‘the snow and chill of north-east England’ to knock on ...”

“... swamp. Readers of these poems might be surprised to learn that early medieval England had cities. York, which had been a Roman garrison town, flourished as a trading settlement (or wic in Old English). On the Thames, about a mile upstream from ancient Londinium, sat Lundenwic, a bustling hub with a population in the thousands, in what is now Aldwych (‘Old ...”