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“... US is home to some 6.5 million Russian-language immigrants, 1.6 million of whom live in the New York Tri-State Area. Most arrived broke in two waves of immigration, in the 1970s and then the 1990s, but now they’re one of the most successful immigrant groups in the city, outstripping even the Chinese in median income. Politicians are suddenly waking up to ...”

“... of Kipling). Indeed, the last essay in Bartleby in Manhattan is an attack on an English critic, Peter Conrad, for trying his hand at just this sort of thing. In these American observers and explainers two characteristics recur. The first is a close attention to the significance of detail (‘no ideas but in things’) which is often left to speak for ...”

“... great economy, but convey a vivid sense of place (she herself comes from Chicago, and lives in New York). She specialises in brief moments of stillness, when things fall into focus. Her characters are often treated to spells of levitation during which they see themselves from outside, or from the future, or from some point near the ceiling, as in those ...”

“... The​ American photographer Peter Hujar once told a friend who was feeling unattractive: ‘As you’re walking along, say to yourself: I’m me.’ Hujar’s subjects seem to have heeded the same advice: they exhibit a self-possession tending to the monumental. You can see it in his 1981 portrait of the actor Madeline Kahn ...”

“... that one of the first issues the paper has chosen to take a stand on is the wretched case made by Peter Levi for the wretched poems which the paper went with him in attributing to Shakespeare. Those I know who have become regular readers praise its journalistic craftsmanship in much the same terms as I would praise its design: it makes useful information ...”

“... three times a week; you can look right through its width from front entrance to back door. In New York spaces like this are often public as part of a deal the developer has struck with the planners; here the us-and-them confrontation is a mild affront, like the envy-inducing view into any other desirable enclosure. What the view from outside does not tell ...”

“... were on a par with rugs, tables and chairs. It would have demeaned an abstract painter in New York in the 1950s to suggest that his (or her) work was just part of a design ensemble. But for Modernists like Le Corbusier, painting had no special status: Ozenfant and he promoted a style – Purism – which exemplified his belief that all art and design ...”

“... beaks which emerge from the webs of lines in David Levine’s wonderful pen drawings for the New York Review of Books, and his watercolour and pencil heads for the New Yorker, tend to be riffs on existing images. Boxer, in many ways a far less accomplished artist, achieved likeness though a grasp of significant features and brilliant acts of elimination. The ...”

“... work, not just what is shown here in London or what was seen in the companion exhibition in New York, persuades you that it was his masterpiece.* The painter’s attention is of the kind that lets no part of the surface merely suggest fur, flesh, cloth or metal – he includes every hair and stitch. Oil painting like this was the North’s gift to the ...”

“... and positive and negative casts: of a room (Ghost, 1990), of a house (House, 1993), of a New York rooftop water tower (Water Tower, 1997). They are as open to personal interpretation as the plinth and, like found objects, as powerful or delightful (or frightening or horrid or funny or strange) as you like to make them. On the other hand, the meaning you ...”

“... Republic. Although the titles (Figure, Woman) aren’t what Miró promised Pierre Matisse, his New York dealer (‘I will give them titles, since they are based on reality’), the figures are fierce enough to be easily read as expressions of political despair. ‘Still Life with Old Shoe’, 1937 You meet the question of just how art that stayed clear ...”

“... and so on – that re-created the displays of goods for sale that homeless people place on New York sidewalks. That collection was put out for one day in 1991, set in groups along 45 feet of pavement in Cooper Square. Generally speaking Brobdingnagian is gross, Lilliputian quaint or playful. Different scales play on feelings in different ways. Take Ron ...”

“... A decade later, these fields of marks would seem to have prefigured what was happening in New York abstract painting.From the time he was appointed to the staff of the Bauhaus in 1921, Klee wrote and thought a lot about the nature of art and how it might be taught, and in his catalogue essay Robert Kudielka turns to the writings for explanations. In ...”

“... have driven artists and their galleries out of the SoHo lofts and streets where the School of New York once flourished. The exhibits include some very pretty asides on clothes: Maureen Connor’s 1981 Birth of the Bustle, for example, in woven reed and organdy is as beautifully made and as pretty as anything in Versace. But most of the other attempts to ...”

“... lap and waves a champagne bottle as the pair gleam and glitter smugly against the skyline of New York. Most photographers, even fashion photographers, during those decades built reputations by making images which resemble one another – one kind of light, one way of printing in black and white, one attitude to the model. Parkinson did fashion the compliment ...”