“... forty-year-old often skint but always cadging mother, Helen. Other characters were added later. Peter, the louche businessman with a ‘wallet full of reasons’ to lure Helen offstage and into a brief marriage for the play’s middle sections. Jimmie, the charming ‘coloured naval rating’ who keeps Jo company over Christmas and leaves her pregnant. And ...”

“... The trouble is, Millais’s judgment, in whatever spirit it was made, has been that of posterity. Peter Funnell’s essay in the catalogue of the exhibition now at the National Portrait Gallery quotes Arthur Symons, writing in 1896, a few months after Millais’s death: ‘a finer promise than any artist of his time’ was wasted. His later pictures were done ...”

“... asks him to find her lost virginity. Or, let’s say, a time bomb has been planted in Midtown New York; our hero has to defuse it, but in his search discovers that the bomb is merely a metaphor symbolising his own fuming self. In the final scene, he jumps into the Hudson and drowns; the city is saved. Metaphysics, if it can be defined at all, is highbrow ...”

“... his walk-on parts are self-mocking or aggrandising. In City of Glass, the first volume in the New York Trilogy, the writer’s identity is always a plaything: Quinn, the writer, uses the pseudonym William Wilson, who himself writes about the improbably named Max Work, and is mistaken for Paul Auster, ‘of the Auster Detective Agency’. (The ...”

“... Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, kept in her New York apartment in the 1870s a stuffed baboon with a copy of The Origin of Species under its arm, along with a platonically infatuated colonel, a golden Buddha, and piles of esoteric books. The baboon represented the science and materialism which were creeping up on the late 19th century and which Blavatsky and many others felt to be threatening and arid ...”

“... weeks later, I received a ‘pre-action letter’ from Boies Schiller Flexner, a law firm in New York whose clients have included Al Gore and Harvey Weinstein. The letter stated that openDemocracy, of which I am the editor-in-chief, had defamed a UK-registered shell company called Jusan Technologies. Four months earlier, we had reported that Jusan held ...”

“... foxes in one session.’ But hunters were also early systematic observers. Edward, second Duke of York, in his Master of the Game noticed what David Macdonald’s research has confirmed: foxes eat worms. As it became a more respectable quarry the fox was pampered: its habitat was protected, its enemy, the farmer with chickens, bought off, and the long ...”

“... At a New York cocktail party shortly after the war, a young and insecure physics postgraduate was heard to blurt out to a woman he had met there: ‘I just want to know what Truth is!’ This was Thomas Kuhn and what he meant was that specific truths such as those of physics mattered less to him than acquiring metaphysical knowledge of the nature of truth ...”

“... on the long-drawn-out demise of the former Soviet Union, seen through the eyes of a New York journalist and film critic: a process that began with the death of Stalin and ended with the sale of chunks of the Berlin Wall in Bloomingdale’s. Hoberman chronicles these events from the point of view of three related personae: the thoughtful Jewish New ...”

“... on ‘False Gods’. In the fall of that year he left without a degree and worked in New York as a book-keeper for his uncle. In 1924 he enrolled in art classes, then returned to Portland, where he studied acting. By 1929 he was back in New York and teaching art two days a week. He became a friend of Adolph ...”

“... of Oxford and the courts of Cambridge, as he processed through the cloisters of Canterbury and York, as he marched across Horse Guards Parade and trod the gilded pavements of the City, he must often have glimpsed the footprints of Anthony Sampson, who blazed this trail nearly thirty years ago for his Anatomy of Britain and subsequently retraced his steps ...”

“... At moments like this, the career charted by these essays is like something from the brain of Peter York, an intellectual Style Wars. Whether or not you can translate ‘the specificity ...’ into ‘the distinctive thing ...’ is a vexing question, and one on which the newness of theory in part hinges. For theory certainly has a new ...”

“... The Painted Word, was a reasonable succès de scandale among those with enough interest in the New York School of painting to want to defend it, but went little further than that. From Bauhaus to Our House, on the other hand, has achieved the unprecedented feat (in architectural publishing) of making its way, albeit briefly, into the American best-seller ...”

“... holy herself. She left for Dublin and then, in 1958, for London, with later descents on New York. She has led, she thinks, a divided life, and the division of her life into successive places is distinctly mirrored in the instalments of this memoir. Her life is palpable in her fiction, and her fiction is palpable in the memoir, as the titling of her ...”

“... Queensland in the early 1970s was, according to the narrator of Peter Carey’s new novel, ‘a police state run by men who never finished high school’. This intriguing throwaway remark turns out to be not much of an exaggeration. For twenty years from 1968, Queensland was controlled by the corrupt, gerrymandering state governor Joh Bjelke-Petersen, variously described as the Hillbilly Dictator, a ‘bible-bashing bastard’ and – by himself – as ‘a bushfire raging out of control ...”