“... lurking sadness in this volume, in spite of its many displays of verbal energy. Both Harrison and Peter Symes, who worked with him on a number of these pieces, insist quite rightly that the films are the thing, the texts ‘a poor substitute’, in Symes’s words, ‘for seeing them and hearing them’. I hate to ask why we could not have the films ...”

“... of – the NPT. In Leonard Wibberley’s novel The Mouse that Roared (1955), later made into a Peter Sellers film, a tiny impoverished country declares war on the United States in the hope of being rapidly defeated, occupied and reconstructed. The plan goes wrong when the flyweight belligerent inadvertently acquires the world’s most powerful weapon, and ...”

“... by the literary quarterly Nimbus after Macmillan had rejected it. He spent part of 1957 in New York, and after that had a burst of lyric energy which produced a series of love poems, kinder and happier in tone than most of his work (‘praise, praise, praise/ The way it happened and the way it is’). They include the defiantly reckless title sonnet of his ...”

“... a malady reminiscent of the encephalitis which has sent insecticide helicopters whirring above New York for the last two summers. Air-conditioning, the American addiction to perfect frigidity, has been outlawed. Despite floods, winds, thunder and lightning, hail, the population of the US remains fixated on celebrity-goggling and the accumulation of fashionable ...”

“... are still being published. In 1996 the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation came out of New York in four volumes: 2004 pages, 1226 articles by 472 scholars in 24 countries, none of them writing about Ch’eng I and Ch’enga Hao. And Routledge has recently launched The Reformation, a four-volume set of 72 reprinted essays. It’s still an industry, and ...”

“... who was part of the British mission to Los Alamos, and Ted Hall, a bright young physicist from New York. Both were communist sympathisers. They had sent detailed information to Moscow on the bomb’s design, as well as a list of the nuclear facilities being commissioned for the project. Merkulov reported that the British and American scientists working on the ...”

“... The Head and the Load, which premiered at Tate Modern in July, is now showing at the Armory in New York (until 15 December). It tells the story of African porters serving the Great Powers as they fought it out in their respective African colonies; in one episode, droves of porters drag boats through the jungle to the shores of Lake Tanganyika for a naval ...”

“... think I don’t need to. My first reading, before any reviews appeared, concurs with what I took Peter Ackroyd to be saying on Kaleidoscope, that the bulk of the narrative can be read and enjoyed in a moderately literal way as a mystery story set in London, even though the mystery turns out to be not soluble at this level. My second reading was helped by the ...”

“... imaginary ones. The Chaco ‘phenomenon’, as it was called in the title of an exhibition in New York, seemed to be another. It was not this, however, that accounted for the media interest in Man Corn. What excited them was the Turners’ claim that half the skeletal collections they review provide evidence, not merely of violence and murder, but of a ...”

“... to be entitled to a powerful sexual overtone, even if not the customary one. The reviewers of Peter Gay’s book have been very receptive to the thought that we have got Victorian sexuality wrong: for it is a leading part of the author’s argument that the Victorians were not prevailingly ignorant, inhibited, prudish and hypocritical about sex. But the ...”

“... Governess in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw sees her first ghost, that of the wicked valet Peter Quint, the words she uses to describe the event – which initially persuades her that her ‘imagination’ has ‘turned real’, in the person of her handsome employer – are words in which Hamlet is remembered. ‘It was plump, one afternoon, in the ...”

“... in the glory years of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Now he was ousting the deeply unpopular Peter Swales, who had been chairman for twenty years, and I was in the stands cheering his arrival. But when I interviewed Lee, I was unsettled to discover that the takeover was in fact a corporate deal. He and his associates were buying 29.99 per cent of the ...”

“... that there was ‘no Soviet source’ for the DNC leaks, and the title of a piece in the New York Review of Books – though it was soon corrected to reflect events since 1991 – asked: ‘Was Snowden a Soviet Agent?’ The Russian official media, in their turn, have been producing waves of anti-Western rhetoric for a few years now, but the Ukraine ...”

“... 2012, the day after the Rome congress, with King’s fragment on the front page of the New York Times, Faust announced that she was rejecting the panel’s recommendation. ‘Did a forgery help save Harvard Divinity School?’ Sabar asks. Faust declined to comment.But​ all this came out long after King’s brief moment of glory. At the time, Sabar ...”

“... to England. These incomers didn’t go on to develop much affection for their adopted country. Peter of Savoy bequeathed the huge estates he had acquired to his relatives back in Savoy and his palace on the Strand (where the Savoy Hotel now stands) to the prior of the hospice on the Grand St Bernard Pass. Matthew Paris lamented that ‘the English nobility ...”