“... with actors. There are magnificent performances in his movies – by George C. Scott, James Mason, Peter Sellers, George Macready, Kirk Douglas, Nicole Kidman, Sterling Hayden; and in smaller roles, Slim Pickens, Peter Ustinov, Sue Lyon, Leonard Rossiter, Shelley Winters, Sydney Pollack – but there is never a trace of ...”

“... agent Rosalind Chatto to tell her that when in last year’s LRB diary I quote an old lady in New York as saying ‘I zigged when I should have zagged’ the original remark came from the American sports reporter Red Butler, who reported it as having been said by Randolph Turpin after his defeat by Sugar Ray Robinson. How my old lady came to know this is a ...”

“... And he was broke. He was living what Stevens and Swan call ‘an almost feral life’ when he met Peter Lacy. Lacy was handsome, six years younger than Bacon and played the piano in nightclubs. He ‘had no interest in the literary or art world,’ Stevens and Swan write. ‘He did not conceal his dislike for Bacon’s paintings. In fact, his indifference ...”

“... with Tyrone Guthrie by describing him as a ‘highly cerebral’ director, and amuse showbiz New York mightily with the statement that, after their star-crossed Romeo and Juliet on Broadway in 1940, Olivier and Vivien Leigh went to lick their wounds for a month in Vermont with ‘the Alexander Woollcotts’. The English period equivalent would be a month in ...”

“... Murakami’s interviewees said she had lived for a year in the US and she knew that people in New York would have behaved differently. Yes, of course, a little differently, but significantly so? Enough to alter the outcome? Recent letters to the New York Times describe what happens in an airplane when a crisis is announced ...”

“... bodies could not be reassembled, bones picked from the mud. ‘The government of the time,’ Peter Ashley wrote in his English Heritage booklet, Lest We Forget (2004), ‘refused to acknowledge the concept of the repatriation of the dead, so these monuments became the focal points for grief.’ The fallen of King’s Cross are uniformly capitalised: a ...”

“... of a coal merchant from Transylvania, Johan Petrus Hornung, who anglicised his name to John Peter. Willie was sent off to be thoroughly Englished at Uppingham School, then under the headship of the magnetic Edward Thring. Hornung loved everything about the school – the headmaster, the classics, the ethos of muscular Christianity and above all the ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Ilya Budraitskis, James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy ...”

“... a strange space of lenticular shimmer, partly because of all the glamour: Berlin, Rome, Paris, New York, where Bedford sat out war in Europe in the 1940s, and especially Sanary-sur-Mer, on the ‘unsmart side’ (by Bedford standards) of the Côte d’Azur, where she and her mother settled for some years among the émigré colonies of the 1920s and 1930s. She ...”

“... I’ve come to avoid the tiny interactions that seem much more welcome in New Orleans, even in New York City.After a childhood nearby, I moved to San Francisco in 1980 when street life and bar life were vibrant, but cafés were rare outside North Beach’s Italian neighbourhood. They proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s as places to hang out, maybe read, maybe ...”

“... at the loom and learning to spin gold, which he proceeded to do. After he and Mary moved to New York in 1955 (for what would prove a limited period), Updike established himself as one of the sterling assets of the ‘Talk of the Town’ department, composing reportorial vignettes and musings that helped make his mark even though ‘Talk’ stories were then ...”

“... Rubinstein needs strong evidence to deny that Britain’s was ‘the first industrial economy’ (Peter Mathias) or that there was a ‘transformation of the British economy to an industry state’ (Phyllis Deane). The evidence he relies on comes from income-tax returns: ‘The totals for London and the Home Counties may be taken as convenient shorthand or ...”

“... uses a different sentence-length from the length one uses in the TLS. If, per impossibile, the New York Review of Books and the Sun were to ask me to review very similar books tomorrow, the outcome would be very different in terms of verbal constructions, vocabulary and paragraphing, even before sub-editors got their hands on the copy. Again, one writes ...”

“... in that he has no theme, no political stance. He is an unusual scholar. He practised law in New York for 25 years – and he writes more like a judge delivering a favourable summing-up than a defence advocate, like Cole, always giving his client the benefit of the doubt. George Spater then became chairman and chief executive officer of American ...”

“... Yet, as Momigliano recalled in 1975, in a review of Democracy Ancient and Modern for the New York Review of Books, Finley disappointed Italian Marxists like Di Benedetto, Lanza, and those looking for a ‘historian of revolutions’. He determinedly opposed the notion that there were quick and facile lessons to be applied from Athens or Rome in support ...”