“... 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 ...”

“... ignore them as being of no more account than pigeons and as inscrutable as gang graffiti. In New York and Los Angeles (where they parody the consumer-mad host society by heaping their possessions in supermarket trollies), they are called the ‘homeless’. There is, as far as I know, no generic English name. Moorcock calls them ‘ordinary ...”

“... in must still be there under the surface. But then Blum went back to the East Coast, to the New York art world of which Irwin says: ‘It’s like an echo chamber; its overwhelming sense of itself, of its past, of its present and its mission becomes utterly restricting.’ Blum also had to try to market the product: ‘Whenever Irwin did a series of works ...”

“... calculation’, Tromly thinks, rather than ideological conversion. But the love affair between New York socialists and Russian DPs was short-lived. The socialists were too Jewish for the DPs’ liking; and, despite their connections with the New York intelligentsia, they lacked access to the large handouts of American ...”

“... the mere thought of which ignites flames of greed and covetousness under people all over New York and, for that matter, all over the world,’ Wolfe wrote. Epstein’s house on East 71st Street, which was said to be the biggest of its kind in the city, was as creepy as its owner. With a stone satyr over the fifteen-foot front door and forty rooms over ...”

“... deals with are in the American social-documentary tradition: Jacob Riis, who took pictures of New York slums in the last decades of the 19th century; Lewis Hine, who recorded the conditions of workers (most memorably, child workers) in turn-of-the century mills and factories; Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans and others who worked for the Farm Security ...”

“... narrator was officially black (Johnson published the novel anonymously). More recently, the New York Times critic Anatole Broyard, who died in 1990, was unmasked in the New Yorker by Henry Louis Gates. In the early 1950s, Broyard had threatened to sue the publishers of a novel by Chandler Brossard, Who Walk in Darkness, which contained a character evidently ...”

“... V. Prochnow Jr, with 65 entries by Prochnow senior; and in Quotations For Our Time, by Dr Laurence Peter (author of The Peter Principle), with 37 entries of his own. It’s not wholly a new conceit: even L. T. Hoyt, last century, was not so unjust to himself as to deny his own verses comparison with those of Tennyson and ...”

“... After a period when it mainly conjured up images of street violence and urban deterioration, New York is once again America’s number one tourist attraction, and neighbourhoods long in decline are undergoing remarkable revivals. To be sure, a few blemishes mar the renaissance: the periodic killing of unarmed black men by the police, for example, or the persistent failure of the public school system ...”

“... Bronfman, sent her pictures of the 34-storey skyscraper he planned to build on Park Avenue in New York. Bronfman, the Canadian ‘whisky king’ who owned Seagram distillers, had commissioned Pereira & Luckman to create a gleaming metal and glass edifice that resembled a decanter gift set. ‘This letter starts with one word repeated very emphatically NO NO ...”

“... into the Czechoslovakia of Andy’s origins, Warhol was writhing in agony on the floor of his New York studio, shot by Valerie Solanas, a funny woman who had appeared in one of his movies. By that time Warhol had come to represent what Don DeLillo has called ‘the revenge of popular culture on those who take it too seriously’. Warhol outlined a new sort of ...”

“... the newly opened Paul Klee Museum in Berne (1999-2007) and the Morgan Library extension in New York (2000-06). Current clients in this vein include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Chicago Art Institute, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In the other categories, Piano has schemes underway for ...”

“... here; or at least not more foreign than the present. The movie, like the novel, is set in New York in 1870s, and has a little epilogue in Paris. Its social world is the stuffy, intricate, righteous East Coast upper class, who think most of America is low and all of Europe is louche. Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is about to be engaged to May Welland ...”

“... His early works featured characters designed to resemble his past lives and former friends: a New York art critic in obsessive love (Horse Crazy); an American who acted in European art films (Gone Tomorrow). His fourth and fifth novels both contained accounts of real multiple murders, along with real bondage, real child abuse and real drugs. Depraved ...”

“... we were chatting outside the corner shop, how she remembered the herds of cattle thundering up York Way from King’s Cross to the slaughterhouses in Market Road. ‘You could feel the ground shake under your feet well before you could see them. It was always dangerous crossing that road,’ she’d say, standing on the kerb, eyeing the cars and lorries as ...”