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“... generations of artists, architects and scholars have represented the city. Bender begins in Washington Square, reminding us that the vibrant public park of today’s Greenwich Village ‘was born in death’, serving as a potter’s field for the indigent and criminal classes between the cholera epidemic of 1798 and 1828, when the Square officially ...”

“... start again on a new page: in Hunting Mister Heartbreak (1990), Raban adopts a different identity (John Rayburn, Rainbird) for each place he visits. In Waxwings, set in the ‘virtual city’ of Seattle at the height of the dot.com boom, American reality bites back. A professor’s bookish enthusiasm for the ‘Jeffersonian ideal of life, liberty and the ...”

“... as there was to the numerical patterns that Russell Crowe’s character, the mathematician John Nash, saw in magazine articles and Dow Jones reports in A Beautiful Mind. Nash in his illness started seeing the patterns and the threats they conveyed everywhere. He had no reality check, no filter and no way of ordering priorities. Like the American ...”

“... Bouk approaches it through the story of one family, the Moriyamas, whose son Iwao had moved to Washington in 1940 to work in the Division of Vital Statistics. In the census that year, probably because he was living in a boarding house full of white people, the enumerator classified Iwao Moriyama’s race as ‘white’ and he escaped internment.Fear​ of ...”

“... a level of attention from the prestige press he had never enjoyed while alive. Reporting for the Washington Post, Joyce Wadler got conflicting appraisals of the man. ‘The PLO, as he saw it and told me several times, were the only ones who were educating the children,’ recalled Moana Tregaskis, the widow of the war correspondent Richard Tregaskis, and ...”

“... The​ US National Archives in Washington contain a letter to President Truman from a concerned citizen called Phyllis Craig, who accuses him of wanting to ‘fill our once fine country with morons and other unworthies who are here in large numbers through lax immigration laws to get all they can out of America and bring nothing but filth and self-interest ...”

“... US and Britain cope with mass death and the destruction of livelihoods. Covid-19 shattered what John Stuart Mill called ‘the deep slumber of a decided opinion’, forcing many to realise that they live in a broken society, with a carefully dismantled state. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung put it in May, unequal and unhealthy societies are ‘a good breeding ...”

“... was the ideal form of American self-expression. This conviction carried him to art schools in Washington DC, Boston and Philadelphia, and briefly to Europe, on a failed odyssey to train under Oskar Kokoschka. Once he realised paintings could move, he made his first short, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), and then The Alphabet, which earned him a spot at ...”

“... extracts from a video taken from an interview carried out by an eminent neurologist, Professor John Hodges, and presumably taped for research purposes. It’s sanctioned, one imagines, by John Bayley, whose efforts on behalf of his late wife and her reputation make Max Clifford seem timid and retiring. One lesson of this ...”

“... and dust in Sacramento would be like a plague or a curse – so that Joan’s new husband, John Gregory Dunne, when he came to visit, would use a mischievous finger to write ‘DUST’ here and there. Dunne, who died at the end of last year, was tall, handsome, articulate, funny – the man of the world behind whose attractive show Joan hid and ...”

“... with HMQ still at it, and the policemen in the forecourt very jolly and eating ice cream.1 June. John Horder dies at 92, who, after a succession of bad doctors at university and in New York, was the physician who restored my faith in the medical profession. It was partly because he listened, as doctors have learned to do since, I hope, but which in the early ...”

“... of Trump in 2016. The new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and the national security adviser, John Bolton, are believers in US force projection whose appetite for wars can only frustrate Trump’s announced purpose to withdraw from the wars we are already in. The extent to which this president understands so basic a fact about a government he nominally ...”

“... stress Trump’s indecency and pledge to return America to ‘normalcy’. Instead, Biden went to Washington, and Neilia was killed with their one-year-old daughter, Naomi, when their car was hit by a truck. Much has been written about Biden as ‘America’s mourner’, given preternatural powers of empathy by the loss of his wife, his daughter and then, in ...”

“... getting away from Cambridge on frequent trips to Europe. He worked for a time in the studio of John La Farge and might have become a talented painter; he went with Louis Agassiz on a scientific expedition to the Amazon; he received a degree in medicine from Harvard, where, despite his abhorrence of laboratory work and mostly to please his father, he ...”

“... election campaign. Japan’s economic prowess was already more than a little annoying to Washington: that year saw the first major postwar US-Japan trade confrontation, one that would culminate in the imposition of a temporary surcharge on Japanese imports. Nevertheless, the US regarded Japan with satisfaction. In American eyes, the country had been ...”