“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... initiated by Suu Kyi, and obediently agreed by the NLD executive, has been just as unexpected. Peter Popham’s life of Aung San Suu Kyi is gripping, partisan and emotional, a welcome complement to the only other serious biography in English, Justin Wintle’s assiduously comprehensive Perfect Hostage. It contains fascinating new material and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”