“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... thinking. Sing a New Song is the catalogue of an exhibition held at the Morgan Library in New York last year which demonstrated that influence. The show, masterminded by Roger S. Wieck, the library’s head of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts until his death earlier this year, gathered together a dazzling array of psalters dating from the fourth ...”

“... time at the Trafalgar Studios. I saw the first production at Wyndham’s in 1964 with Madge Ryan, Peter Vaughan and Dudley Sutton. Good in the part Sutton was already too old, as have been most of the actors who’ve played in it since. It’s a play I would dearly like to have written, though these days for it to retain its shock value the young man should ...”

“... members of the family who sympathised with her parents’ politics, has long made her home in New York. Her account of her childhood and of Lucan’s character is balanced, regretful and affectionate. Through her eyes the man begins to emerge from behind the cardboard cut-out, and it is her recollections and those of Lucan’s unnamed schoolfriend, who had ...”

“... is finding out about them. Final Exit, like Spycatcher, is a best-seller in America. Like Peter Wright, Derek Humphry is a renegade Briton. He admits to having ‘assisted’ three of his loved ones exit: under British law he is a serial killer. Humphry confessed to his part in the suicide of his first wife Jean in his biography of her, published in ...”

“... until they form a single unit, set square to the prevailing on-shore winds. The occupier, New York-born to a childhood in John Cheever commuting country, now reinvented as a Vietnam-vintage Irish citizen, removes all the offending oil paintings from the wall: jewelled landscapes in oil; lively, naive renderings of the headland on which the cottages have ...”

“... certainly fed into Schoenberg’s next major work, the oratorio Gurrelieder, a setting of Jens Peter Jacobsen’s tale of the Danish king Waldemar’s love for his mistress Tove. In November 1901, Schoenberg moved to Berlin to take up the post of musical director at the Buntes Theatre, one of the city’s most fashionable cabaret venues. It was a ...”

“... uncompromising and deeply protective. She shied away from the lens, her most recent biographer, Peter Kurth, explains, because ‘she could make no natural motion while posing for the camera.’ Natural motion – as opposed to the engraved arcs and acrobatic tricks of classical ballet, the swooning decadence of the waltz or the silliness of social dancing ...”

“... He picks up. It’s the travel agent, calling to say there’s a seat on an earlier flight to New York. ‘You run away from me the first chance you get!’ he growls, clutching her throat. ‘Don’t act like this, Dix! I can’t live with a maniac,’ she protests, before he pushes her onto the bed and starts to strangle her. In version one, Dix finishes ...”

“... in November 1949. A stop in London with relatives was still all German, as were a few weeks in New York. My mother’s brother – my Onkel Otto – and his wife lived in Manhattan near Fort Tryon Park, in the middle of a German-Jewish ghetto. Later, when we had settled in West Virginia, my mother visited them periodically and came back complaining how insular ...”