“... the Hitler-Stalin Pact in the following historical sense. He knows that the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky had warned Washington of growing Moscow-Berlin rapprochement (though he does not connect this to the Munich sellout) and he runs the whole development together by saying: ‘Time ran out. When Hitler and Stalin made the pact to which Krivitsky ...”

“... his enormous posthumous Collected won America’s National Book Award for 1971; its editor, Donald Allen, has since brought out a Selected and several more volumes of prose and verse. During the 1950s, O’Hara reviewed art and contemporary classical music. He wrote at least seven poems called ‘On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday’, and many others in which music ...”

“... insufficiently bullish towards America’s godless Communist enemies. He even chose a humanist, Walter Mondale, as his vice-president. In the early 1970s, Christian leaders had started building the alternative networks of communication and scholarship that still define the evangelical movement: this was the moment when Christian television channels began to ...”

“... Holocaust, from a TV play by Jack Rosenthal set in London called Bar Mitzvah Boy, and from Woody Allen films. I’m not sure I was even conscious in the 1970s that Woody Allen was Jewish. He was a funny American comedian who looked a bit like me. I had no Jewish experience. And then came Granny’s near-death announcement ...”

“... consideration, under duress or in self-defence. In the words of the feminist criminologist Hilary Allen, it has the dubious advantage of rendering such women, and by implication all women, ‘harmless’, never the fully conscious agents of their own deeds: ‘What is potentially oppressive to women – criminal or otherwise – is for the frailties and ...”

“... Vietnam Syndrome. His ‘theory of the Cold War’ was ‘We win, they lose,’ as he told Richard Allen, who became his first national security adviser. Allen liked the idea but knew it would be heresy to a foreign policy establishment that believed in peaceful co-existence. Yet times had changed: what was a reactionary ...”

“... or their abandonment. In the absence of the ordinary sutures of language, ellipses prevail. For Allen Tate, the most influential critic of the 1930s, Dickinson took this too far: she ‘perceives abstraction and thinks sensation’, he wrote, but her ‘ignorance, her lack of formal intellectual training’ means ‘she cannot reason at all. She can only ...”

“... for not being commented on – there’s no weary acknowledgment of her parents’ love of Edgar Allen Poe. The arbitrarily invoked Gothic strain is taken fairly far: ‘Sometimes in the night she would call out this name, her own, “Lenore!” in a strong urgent voice, and Helen in her own room would shudder and cry a little.’ Then there are heightened ...”

“... assimilated to secular enlightenment values and, two generations on, produced the likes of Walter Lippmann and J. Robert Oppenheimer – cultivated Jewish men at ease among the gentile ruling class of the early 20th century. Moses’s father, Emanuel Moses, owned a flourishing department store in New Haven and had begun to buy up real estate in the ...”

“... Graz, I found myself confronted by D784, the second of three piano sonatas in A minor. My teacher, Walter Kamper, belonged to the generation of Austrian pianists (including Jörg Demus, Paul Badura-Skoda, Walter Klien and, most notably, Alfred Brendel) who did much to raise public awareness of Schubert’s piano sonatas, and ...”

“... by David Garnett, features on Duncan Grant, and Woolf wrote five pieces, including one about Sir Walter Raleigh. Vogue still owed something to the society magazine that was the earliest incarnation of the American edition, and the first frontispiece went to Eileen Wellesley, daughter of the Duke of Wellington, photographed by E.O. Hoppé; one of Vogue’s ...”

“... simplicity and euphony’ after growing embarrassed by his youthful attempts to write like Walter Pater. Writing for the theatre also taught him ‘the value of succinctness’: in his novels and stories, he gave up on brocaded descriptions and concentrated on dialogue, narrative development and manipulating the reader’s expectations. But his ...”

“... a Boy’, and elsewhere referenced the deaths of two of her mentors, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. The sleeve of Gung Ho (2000) was the first not to feature her own portrait, replacing it with an old snapshot of her late father. She seemed to be securing some kind of future by assessing her past (a not uncommon manoeuvre in middle age, even ...”

“... be a credible candidate to head the new formation, and its leadership fell to his long-time rival Walter Veltroni, the DS mayor of Rome, as a fresher choice. Privately, the two men despise each other – D’Alema regarding Veltroni as a fool, Veltroni D’Alema as a knave. But outwardly, together with a motley crew of devotees and transfuges, they joined ...”

“... history is not.’ Young Fritz started pre-med but ended up studying history at Columbia, where Allen Ginsberg was his debating partner. He stayed on for graduate school, left for a few years to teach at Cornell, and then took a job at his alma mater, where he has remained. And so ends the book-within-a-book that has drawn deservedly favourable ...”