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“... Berie with an ardour that makes subsequent attachments seem feeble. Growing up in Horsehearts, New York, a fictional town so remote as to make Albany seem ‘glamorous, forbidding’, the two girls romp outdoors; they try on clothes; they sing folksongs; they quote from Desiderata; and, being not only bright but cool, they smoke, drink and get into ...”

“... This month in New York, the fashionable charity named United Cerebral Palsy is having an ‘awards’ event. I think that the winners must have been picked some time ago. The ‘outstanding achievement’ prize goes to General Colin Powell, and will be presented by Barbara Walters. The ‘humanitarian’ award goes to Diana Spencer and will be presented by Henry Kissinger ...”

“... and published one collection of essays before her death from cancer, aged 53, in 1997. Born in New York, she began writing when she returned there in the early 1970s after studying at Brandeis and the University of California, San Diego, a brief marriage, and spells working as a stripper, a bakery clerk and in several other eccentric jobs. She spent a few ...”

“... longer before I die – I fall to brooding about that devastating term of abuse of our times, the Peter Pan crow of complacency: Get a life. I am impressed and rather envious of those who use the phrase: that they can be so certain that they know what a life is, and so convinced that they have one. From the note of disdain with which the phrase is spoken, it ...”

“... convenience: ‘restaurants, theatre tickets’. Larsen was born in Chicago in 1891. Her father, Peter Walker, was Black and came from the Danish West Indies; her mother, Marie, was a white Danish immigrant. Walker disappeared soon after Nella’s birth. Her mother then married a fellow Danish immigrant who never accepted his mixed-race stepdaughter. Nella ...”

“... The one line that everybody knows about why people climb mountains was spoken on a wet night in New York, 17 March 1923. The tall, lean and theatrically handsome George Mallory, clergyman’s son, Winchester and Magdalen College, Oxford, artillery officer on the Western Front, faultless husband and devoted father of three, was on a lecture tour, trying to raise money for the forthcoming all-British attempt (his third) on Mount Everest ...”

“... Atlantic and married Englishmen. They are not to be confused, though, with Edith Wharton’s New York ‘buccaneers’ or millionairesses like Consuelo Vanderbilt, who married the Duke of Marlborough. The Langhornes despised jumped-up Yankee ‘dollar princesses’: their own blood, they knew, was blue, and it seems never to have occurred to them that they ...”

“... phone calls to the writer, Sam Shepard. For Wings of Desire Wenders had his old collaborator Peter Handke write nine ‘texts’, including a poem about childhood: but otherwise the film had no script. As Wenders told an interviewer, ‘I said to myself, “The idea came so spontaneously, we must go on like that. We must remain spontaneous.” Everyone ...”

“... of low expectations’. ‘Bush’s conversational storytelling makes for engaging reading,’ Peter Baker writes in the New York Times. ‘It’s folksy, sharply observed and surprisingly affecting,’ Michiko Kakutani says in the same paper. ‘A helluva good read,’ Douglas Brinkley writes in the Financial ...”

“... my presence runs counter to their best interests.’A year later, I ran into Nora Ephron in New York and told her about the Yale evening. ‘Your friend Joan Didion seems such a fragile, breakable person,’ I said. ‘Dunne seems like an odd choice as husband.’ ‘Oh, no, Tom, you’re completely wrong,’ Nora said. ‘It’s John Gregory Dunne who’s ...”

“... to Pound in general and to the Pisan sequence in particular. Black Mountain, the Beats, the New York School, ‘confessional’ poets such as Lowell and Berryman: none of them are imaginable, in their various experiments and excellences, without the precedent of Pound. And, second, there were a few devoted but enormously able scholars, notably Hugh ...”

“... an outlaw: he was captured by an American vessel off the west coast of Africa, brought back to New York, tried there for piracy by a judge and jury and sentenced according to law. Although he knows of the Gordon case, Daniel Heller-Roazen appears not to understand all this. Since his chair at Princeton is in comparative literature, this would be unsurprising ...”

“... a Battenberg prince related by marriage to the British royal family; and a fifth the future King Peter of Serbia. (Nicholas’s son, Prince Mirko, is aid to have been the inspiration for Danilo Danilowitsch in Lehar’s The Merry Widow. Nicholas’s support for the insurrection against Ottoman rule in neighbouring Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1870s inspired ...”

“... She reveals most about her own shortcomings when she reflects on other people’s. Thinking about Peter Friedl’s presentation of a stuffed giraffe at the 2007 Documenta show in Kassel, for instance, she registers a worry about her own inability to execute a living likeness: Works about Zoos, I test myself: ...”

“... gitano (Gypsy Ballads) is the most famous book of Castilian verse of all time. Poet in New York is probably one of the few radically avant-garde collections with a wide international readership. By comparison, his contemporaries among the Castilian poets laboured under diverse handicaps. Juan Ramón Jiménez’s vast output of mystical symbolist verse ...”