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“... of two of its largest groups. All of this happened on 3 December, which soon became known as New York publishing’s Black Wednesday. There had already been rumblings in the industry. Earlier in the year HarperCollins had put a stop to expense-account lunches. Jonathan Burnham, a senior vice president there, said that things had changed since he started in ...”

“... it. The Modern American Novel is an ‘Opus Book’ (General Editors – Keith Thomas, Alan Ryan, Peter Medawar) intended for students. The Literature of the United States is a volume in the Macmillan History of Literature. But no Oxford undergraduate could get by with generalities like this aperçu of Professor Walker’s: ‘Jewish novels are ...”

“... detail, so characteristic of Ingres, may prompt the visitor to the Metropolitan Museum in New York to wonder whether it was modesty which made Madame Leblanc decline to exhibit so very valuable a possession more ostentatiously in her portrait, or the painter’s reluctance to let sparkle distract from form in the centre of his painting. Readers of ...”

“... conditions there. She followed her brother to America in 1928, where her love for glittering New York made her hate herself. After reading Daughter of Earth, a novel by the radical journalist Agnes Smedley, she joined the American Communist Party. She returned to Germany just in time for the Wall Street Crash and, refusing financial help from her ...”

“... of recruiting the writer as a graduate assistant, ‘would you study the gospel with anyone but St Peter?’ – but also a lovable completism. At Yasnaya Polyana, an ‘International Tolstoy Scholar’ insists on sitting in a stream that Tolstoy used to bathe in, a stream now ‘partly obstructed, and full of vegetable life’. The scholar comes out ...”

“... Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where, unknown to him, his high-life associate, the film-maker Peter Whitehead, had been taken, after suffering a heart attack. It was one of those mornings of indulgent sunshine, filtered through gauze. Lilies and bell-shaped purple flowers. Twigs. A long pine table which gave Marks plenty of elbow room to roll his herbal ...”

“... and upbringing were complicated: immigrant, emigrant, returnee. He was born in Bronxville, New York in 1919. His mother, who had the exotic Proustian name of Albertine Mendes-Monsanto, was of French/Portuguese/Sephardic heritage. His father, Carlo Ferlinghetti, came to the United States from Italy in 1894. But when Ginsberg summarised his colleague’s ...”

“... of the group of Methodist farming families from northern Yorkshire who sailed in the Duke of York for Nova Scotia, and notes how the wetland techniques necessary near the Yorkshire Derwent served them well in the marshlands of the Bay of Fundy. He makes mistakes, particularly on the Scottish setting. He is one of many historians who have obviously never ...”

“... which correspond to a little less than half of the published text: 44 per cent, according to Peter Davison’s estimate. These have now been published in an opulent edition: the right-hand pages of the book give a full-size photograph of the material, the left-hand pages contain Professor Davison’s transcription, laboriously deciphered, the cancellings ...”

“... pioneering work on early modern smells by Mark Jenner, a British historian at the University of York. But Muchembled’s guiding assumption, that human reactions to smells are not innate, but are shaped by experience, is as valid for England as it is for France. Our pleasure in smelling a rose and our disgust at some rotting piece of carrion are equally ...”

“... by border militarisation itself) is being contained.’ The paradox of US-Mexico integration, as Peter Andreas has identified, is that ‘a barricaded border and a borderless economy are being constructed simultaneously.’ And he is eloquent on the ways that undocumented status is used to keep wages low and employees docile. The 1986 Immigration Reform Act ...”

“... for the Advancement of Science. A latent scientific clerisy found itself, in that week at York, and reared astonishingly into public visibility. Next year at Oxford, the following year at Cambridge, and so on, from city to city (Hamilton’s knighthood was conferred at the Dublin meeting of 1835), the annual meeting toured the kingdom, drawing ...”

“... and Paleolithic humans before getting back to Athens and Rome, to Florence, Bruges, Paris and New York. If the class is labelled ‘Art since 1945’, the teleological march will begin in medias res: aesthetic concerns and world-historical events predating the war will be lost in the primordial soup and only a few giant patriarchs will ...”

“... would require censoring. Chinese censors usually target large foreign news outlets such as the New York Times, the BBC, the Economist, or the Wall Street Journal, and leave academics in peace. The New York Times is blocked in both its English and Chinese versions by the Great Firewall of China (the world’s most infamous ...”

“... New York – contrary to popular opinion and Frank Sinatra – is never a city that doesn’t sleep. It sleeps soundly in fact. You walk the streets on certain nights and suddenly you can feel quite alone under the buildings. It’s not that the place is deserted, there are things going on – taxi-cabs, homeless people, late-night walkers, the police – but they can seem to proceed at that hour like things out of step, like odd yearnings of the imagination, or unexpected items in a gasoline-smelling dream of urban ruin ...”