“... with Thomas Wolfe elephantiasis, Styron sends haunted dispatches from the asphalt jungle. ‘New York is vast, hideous and strewn with the wrecks of lost and fidgeting souls.’ Unlike so many others of his word-besotted WWII-vet generation, he would retain this Old Man River rumble in prose, a purple majesty. As the titles of his books indicate – Lie Down ...”

“... in Central Park, had been nominated for an Oscar. (It played with Woody Allen’s Bananas at New York’s Baronet Theatre to brisk business.) In a giddy moment, we’d even taken out one of those bow-wow fuck-off ads in Variety thanking ‘the Industry’ for our nomination. My trajectory seemed as straight and clear as the plane’s flight path on the cabin ...”

“... as the ‘fastest woman on water’ – Britain’s premier speedboat-racer, winner of the Duke of York’s Trophy, and world-record holder in the one and a half litre class. Voraciously homosexual in private life, Carstairs dressed like a beautiful man, smoked cigars, and was pursued from race to race by a gaggle of female fans. (Sir Malcolm Campbell of ...”

“... guide to his intentions and Weltanschauung than the same words mediated by CNN anchors and New York Times columnists. He does not appear to be deranged, as his detractors insist he is. His message is plain: leave the Muslim world alone, and it will leave you alone. Kill Muslims, and they will kill you. ‘America won’t be able to leave this ordeal unless ...”

“... the reactionaries’, and there was ‘nothing to be afraid of in that word socialism’. The New York Times reported a few months later that ‘the raucous-voiced Lord Haw-Haw has taken hold among the lower classes.’ The attempt to kill propaganda by ridicule had resoundingly backfired. ‘Our English radio broadcasts are being taken with deadly ...”

“... mounted, he was easily entrapped. The most persistent of the pretenders who plagued Henry was Peter Warbeck (baptised ‘Perkin’ by the regime to make him sound silly), who claimed to be Richard of York, the younger of the vanished princes. European rulers keen to destabilise England had promoted the claims of this ...”

“... haven’t read her biography); not to mention Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, Peter Brazeau’s disciplined and rather stylish oral biography from 1983.It is Brazeau who supplies a fascinating list of Stevens’s annual earnings; who has the more picturesque quotations (about a place in the Old South where you could get ‘oyster stew from ...”

“... followed from their decisions. They must also share the blame for the blowback that struck New York and Washington on 11 September 2001: al-Qaida was an organisation they helped create and arm. The term ‘blowback’ first appeared in a classified CIA post-action report on the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, carried out in the interests of ...”

“... gentleman who told Bathurst about his reluctant withdrawal from the pleasures of life was Sir Peter de la Billière, commander-in-chief of British forces during the first Gulf War, whose deafening began when he was still in his twenties (he was born in 1934). He was downgraded on the basis of his poor hearing at the age of 36, but appealed and was ...”

“... the last train out of Paris. They stayed in Marseille until May 1942, when they left for New York via Casablanca. In Marseille, Simone decided to work as a farmhand. She also asked Thibon, who had reluctantly agreed that she could work on his farm, to let her sleep outside, which he absolutely refused to do. In the end they compromised on an ...”

“... this picture has of late been injected with new life and massively disseminated by the success of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, whose veneer of shocking realism and occasional flights of pure fancy hardly conceal its basic reinscription of the romantic image. It was time for scholars to hit back, and Amadeus was cited by H.C. Robbins Landon as a main reason for ...”

“... the touching letter Max wrote to Robert Ross, Oscar’s premier initiator, when he was in New York with his half-brother, the famous impresario Herbert Beerbohm-Tree. A Canadian adventurer and confirmed homosexual, Ross was a remarkable and on the whole a rather good man, who became influential in social and political circles: but Beerbohm was nervous of ...”

“... practice may be tempted to cheer. A few pages on, the temptation subsides as we find him in New York releasing a box of giant fleas (mysteriously obtained from a health institute) in the lift-shaft of a hotel which did not meet his standards and which then had to be evacuated. As the book progresses such tales appear less often, though we hear plenty about ...”

“... Interval discussion of the work’s ‘deflected’ sexuality is interrupted by the appearance of Peter Pears, who arrives as a living witness from a kind of heroic era for homosexual artists. The Swimming-Pool Library is a rich and clever and funny novel. The richness is in large part a matter of the density of detail the book manages to accumulate, detail ...”

“... R.H. Robins; and investigate the cultural significance of dictionaries, whether in education (Peter Strevens on Learner’s Dictionaries), in the celebration of a national consciousness (Dr Ramson), in the geographical diffusion of a vocabulary (the admirable Frederic Cassidy on the Dictionary of American Regional English), or in the historical tradition ...”