“... containing the nine muses in marble and four streams representing the great rivers of England. York House, once the home of the bishops of Norwich, was rebuilt by the duke of Buckingham with a Rubens ceiling depicting the duke’s apotheosis. Its only remnant is the old water gate in Embankment Gardens. The Civil War, which is covered in just one page (as ...”

“... out, all knew one another well, or well enough. (Murphy and de Acosta attended the same posh New York girls’ day school; Garland and de Acosta may have had an affair.) They shared friends and lovers, or at least lovers-in-law, on occasion. (Sybille Bedford floats around in this book like a benign sapphic putto.) And though residing in different places at ...”

“... School of London had been vaguely but vigorously identified, and compared in importance to the New York School of the Forties and Fifties. The personnel weren’t new (Bacon, Freud, Auerbach, Kitaj et al), but the identification was, and such identifications are almost everything: in art everyone thinks in history-book chapter headings. At the same time, a ...”

“... brief statement of its current force, and a way of holding the whole issue before our minds, in Peter de Bolla’s book Art Matters.2 De Bolla is looking at a Barnett Newman painting (Vir Heroicus Sublimis) in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has decided that the usual critical questions – what does this ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as I had months – almost After Casement’s arrest in 1916, Conrad wrote to John Quinn in New York: We never talked politics ... He was a good companion: but already in Africa I judged that he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don’t mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion. By emotional force (Congo report, Putumayo etc) he made his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”