“... 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 ...”

“... bachelors, and that’s still the template. Dorothy L. Sayers hardly seemed to believe in Peter Wimsey’s passion for Harriet Vane, and no one else is likely to. In his book Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century, Graham Robb made a strong case that the granddaddy of them all, Poe’s Dupin, is coded as homosexual. Offering a dry précis of ...”

“... as an agent in the mid-1950s, representing the interests of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Joseph Cotten and many lesser lights in the studio firmament. Those of us who knew Clancy – he died in July 2017 in Los Angeles at the age of ninety – can attest that he was a tummler of note, a real-life Zelig who found himself with ...”

“... the West End was primarily theatreland, with more theatres to the acre than any city except New York, but the continuing war between art and commerce meant that while Ibsen and Shaw were transforming British drama, it was Charley’s Aunt, Peter Pan and The Scarlet Pimpernel that played to packed houses. Yet there was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... city on earth, at the heart of the greatest empire the world had ever seen, though by then New York was larger than London and the empire had been shorn of India. You might wonder about this. Can it really be that in the early 1950s British children were taught that they lived in ‘the greatest empire the world has ever seen’? (I don’t remember that I ...”

“... packaged as a cultural commodity, casually churned out at ‘Mostly Mozart’ marathons in New York and London, reduced to background music for the annual passeggiata of the Euronouveaux riches at the Salzburg Festival. Performances of Mozart are now rites rather than occasions for discovery. It is incumbent on us to say we love Mozart. The affirmative ...”

“... basically do whatever he liked, and indeed, in this case, he and his brother, the nautical Duke of York, took a personal interest in the accuracy of various versions of Hooke’s watch, monitoring their performance over weeks and months in the royal closet at Whitehall. Charles II had time for repeated discussions with this physically ill-favoured, socially ...”