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“... its elasticity’. Waving it ‘like a flag of truce’ she lets it flutter off across the New York skyline, bearing with it in the precision of description, some of the false promise of Fifties push-up, long-line femininity. Neither Plath nor Woolf, though ambivalent about high fashion, ever seemed to worry that an interest in clothes would trivialise ...”

“... a stick in the forest, pointlessly descend it. The Duke of Nowhere is also the grand old Duke of York. This motif is repeated on a human scale in the inconsequential narrative of ‘The End of the Line’ (the ‘line’ being both railway and story), where a nameless woman speculates about the only other passenger on the train to the beach, a punk girl ...”

“... film’s stars, Warren Oates, had a fling with Becky, though she ended up marrying its other star, Peter Fonda. And then McGuane saw Margot Kidder. It’s like a libertarian Bonnie and Clyde – ‘we rob banks,’ without quite needing the money – and the mood is vital to the 1970s: the people to love faithfully are those you never quite have.Cue Tuesday ...”

“... Peninsula with the explosive impact of a hundred million hydrogen bombs. The palaeobiologist Peter Ward, writing last year in Nautilus, calls it life’s worst day on Earth, when the world’s global forest burned to the ground, absolute darkness from dust clouds encircled the earth for six months, acid rain burned the shells off of calcareous ...”

“... lurking sadness in this volume, in spite of its many displays of verbal energy. Both Harrison and Peter Symes, who worked with him on a number of these pieces, insist quite rightly that the films are the thing, the texts ‘a poor substitute’, in Symes’s words, ‘for seeing them and hearing them’. I hate to ask why we could not have the films ...”

“... of – the NPT. In Leonard Wibberley’s novel The Mouse that Roared (1955), later made into a Peter Sellers film, a tiny impoverished country declares war on the United States in the hope of being rapidly defeated, occupied and reconstructed. The plan goes wrong when the flyweight belligerent inadvertently acquires the world’s most powerful weapon, and ...”

“... by the literary quarterly Nimbus after Macmillan had rejected it. He spent part of 1957 in New York, and after that had a burst of lyric energy which produced a series of love poems, kinder and happier in tone than most of his work (‘praise, praise, praise/ The way it happened and the way it is’). They include the defiantly reckless title sonnet of his ...”

“... a malady reminiscent of the encephalitis which has sent insecticide helicopters whirring above New York for the last two summers. Air-conditioning, the American addiction to perfect frigidity, has been outlawed. Despite floods, winds, thunder and lightning, hail, the population of the US remains fixated on celebrity-goggling and the accumulation of fashionable ...”

“... are still being published. In 1996 the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation came out of New York in four volumes: 2004 pages, 1226 articles by 472 scholars in 24 countries, none of them writing about Ch’eng I and Ch’enga Hao. And Routledge has recently launched The Reformation, a four-volume set of 72 reprinted essays. It’s still an industry, and ...”

“... who was part of the British mission to Los Alamos, and Ted Hall, a bright young physicist from New York. Both were communist sympathisers. They had sent detailed information to Moscow on the bomb’s design, as well as a list of the nuclear facilities being commissioned for the project. Merkulov reported that the British and American scientists working on the ...”

“... The Head and the Load, which premiered at Tate Modern in July, is now showing at the Armory in New York (until 15 December). It tells the story of African porters serving the Great Powers as they fought it out in their respective African colonies; in one episode, droves of porters drag boats through the jungle to the shores of Lake Tanganyika for a naval ...”

“... think I don’t need to. My first reading, before any reviews appeared, concurs with what I took Peter Ackroyd to be saying on Kaleidoscope, that the bulk of the narrative can be read and enjoyed in a moderately literal way as a mystery story set in London, even though the mystery turns out to be not soluble at this level. My second reading was helped by the ...”

“... imaginary ones. The Chaco ‘phenomenon’, as it was called in the title of an exhibition in New York, seemed to be another. It was not this, however, that accounted for the media interest in Man Corn. What excited them was the Turners’ claim that half the skeletal collections they review provide evidence, not merely of violence and murder, but of a ...”

“... to be entitled to a powerful sexual overtone, even if not the customary one. The reviewers of Peter Gay’s book have been very receptive to the thought that we have got Victorian sexuality wrong: for it is a leading part of the author’s argument that the Victorians were not prevailingly ignorant, inhibited, prudish and hypocritical about sex. But the ...”

“... Governess in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw sees her first ghost, that of the wicked valet Peter Quint, the words she uses to describe the event – which initially persuades her that her ‘imagination’ has ‘turned real’, in the person of her handsome employer – are words in which Hamlet is remembered. ‘It was plump, one afternoon, in the ...”