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“... always an apple, a nut and a shiny new penny.’ Despite living for many years in London and New York (and marrying Tina Brown), Evans has retained an agreeable touch of puzzled or even prudish innocence: ‘the effing and blinding that is the vernacular today’ was unknown in his family. Perhaps he doesn’t realise just how interesting he is in this ...”

“... in 1991. Joseph Heller called it a ‘sizzler’ and Michiko Kakutani announced in the New York Times that Gates had ‘established himself as a novelist of the very first order’. The Times profiled him too: ‘“Beckett is my main man,” Mr Gates says in his office at Newsweek magazine, where he writes about music and books … He is, he ...”

“... Boublil and Schönberg, have pounced on the story of Martin Guerre, and Verlaine, Georg Trakl and Peter Handke, not to mention a dozen playwrights and film-makers, have taken up the tale of Kaspar Hauser. These days the celebrity machine has taken over the translation business: Bottom’s dream is acted out on Big Brother. But the allure of the old style ...”

“... did Chagall really belong ‘among the very great artists of our time’, as the museum curator Peter Selz thought, or was he, as Arthur Danto puts it, ‘overproductive, repetitive and shallow’? Naive, or a self-consciously calculating opportunist? The canny ‘manager of his own fairyland’ (Jean Cassou), or a painter who carefully cultivated his image ...”

“... been looking in the suitcase, I’ve been consulting other sources: my father’s younger brother, Peter, now a robust 86; family photographs; stamp albums; public records; other people’s suitcases; books; barely legible notes despatched to me by my mother, who has a macular hole and a keen memory and styles herself ‘Research Department’ – the kind of ...”

“... Coral herself confronting whichever apparatchik it was that made this decision. 26 April, New York. A middle-aged woman on the bus; a man sitting behind her opens his paper rather noisily and the woman turns round. Woman: I don’t like your paper in my hair. Man: I don’t like your hair in my paper. At this point the bus passes an anti-Castro ...”

“... with Fredric Wertham, the director of psychiatric services at Queens General Hospital in New York. Ellison, who was eligible for the draft, didn’t want to join a segregated army. A friend had suggested that Wertham might find a way to get him a psychiatric deferment. Wertham, a German Jewish emigrant, sympathised, and though a deferment wasn’t needed ...”

“... he gives us this short paragraph about Viri’s general state of being: His friends were Arnaud, Peter, Larry Vern. All friends are friends in a different way. Arnaud was his closest friend; Peter, his oldest. But what comes next is this: He lingered before the counter, his eye passing over coloured bolts of ...”

“... Both authors have moved on. Rushdie, seduced by the high-definition celebrity culture of New York, new smells, brighter lights, has denounced his old midden for its failure to fire his imagination, but Moorcock, in whatever exile he finds himself, returns obsessively to his dream-source, the city of his birth. Mother London, a book whose reputation ...”

“... living together and sometimes apart, and each of them with lovers.Luke had an older brother, Peter, whom both Luke and I idealised in absentia. Peter had left behind a collection of 1960s Marvel comics in sacrosanct box files. These included a nearly complete run of The Fantastic Four, the famous 102 issues drawn by ...”

“... the left, catches up, comes alongside the car. The screen goes dark again and a title says, ‘New York, 1970’. Now we get a view of the moving car from the front, outside the windscreen, the camera slightly off to the driver’s left. Ray Liotta, looking young and spruce but tired, is at the wheel, his face well lit. Robert de Niro, in the passenger ...”

“... is at present something of a fashion for novels reflecting other novels, ironically and obliquely (Peter Ackroyd’s The Great Fire of London comes to mind, with Little Dorrit behind it; or even Flaubert’s Parrot, though biography, fiction and all inform that eccentric piece of writing). These, at best, are neither extensions nor offshoots, but playful and ...”

“... keep a sizeable library in my locker (though my reading was not as highbrow as my fellow historian Peter Burke’s during his stint as a pay clerk in Singapore, which in a typical two days, Vinen tells us, included Galileo, Gide and Rimbaud). Although subject to weekly parades and periodic kit inspections, we were excused weapon training and most other ...”

“... A Practical Guide for Women by the punctuation-crazed Rita Freedman. Publishing houses in New York, busy, as usual, looking for the hot new writing talent, will expect to find it in the medical journals and at psychoanalytic conferences, such is the demand for quasi-medical books which tell you how to deal with life’s crapness. In the same way, editors ...”

“... theory and towards the frontiers being opened up by drugs and neurotransmitters. In 1959 Peter Tripp, a radio DJ in New York, decided to stay awake for two hundred hours to raise money for charity. Tripp set himself up in a glass booth in Times Square, monitored by sleep researchers, where he rapped and span ...”