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“... Frederic Wakeman has long been fascinated with the police and criminals of pre-Communist Shanghai, who were as often each other’s allies as opponents. His first book on the subject, Policing Shanghai 1927-37 (1995), described the self-subverting involvement of the new Kuomintang government’s municipal police bureau in both the opium trade and the civil war against the Communists ...”

“... In the afternoon of 23 April 1989, China’s highest-ranking official, the Party’s general secretary Zhao Ziyang, left from Beijing railway station for an official visit to North Korea. Zhao had considered cancelling the trip because of the student demonstrations that had broken out in Beijing eight days earlier, but decided it wasn’t necessary ...”

“... Mao Zedong’s long, wicked life has generated some lengthy biographies in English. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s is the longest, having overtaken Philip Short’s Mao (1999) and Li Zhisui’s The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1995). It represents an extraordinary research effort. The authors have been working on the project since at least 1986, to judge by the date of the earliest interview cited, which – and this is typical of the access they gained to many highly-placed and interesting people – was with Milovan Djilas ...”

“... States, still regarded in China as Enemy Number One, where two professors – Perry Link and Andrew Nathan – agreed to translate and edit the documents. Both men have been banned from China so, if this is a deliberate leak, they are an improbable choice. Perry Link, an expert on Chinese literature, was a close associate of Professor Fang ...”

“... vaccines from the approximately five million stateless Palestinians living under its rule. As Nathan Thrall demonstrated in the LRB of 21 January, Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories are in effect governed by a single political regime: Israel is responsible for the residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, just as South Africa’s white ...”

“... the morrow we left behind us … and to remind us that the image of the world can be different.’ Andrew Nairne, Kettle Yard’s director, has gathered a great diversity of newish images for the show. Among them are four photographic works by Khadija Saye, who died in the Grenfell Tower fire at the age of 24, two days after she had been invited to ...”

“... Before he became Senator for New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was an academic and the author, with Nathan Glazer, of Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City, published in 1963. Moynihan’s chief contribution was the chapter on the New York Irish, a lament which begins: ‘New York used to be an Irish city ...”

“... moved for several months to New York (where all true writers lived) … ‘It was complicated,’ Nathan [Tarcov] explains, of the movements of his father, Bellow and Rosenfeld in the late 1930s and early 1940s: ‘Oscar, Isaac and Saul went to New York at different times. It was almost like they took turns … There was a sense that [New York] was the centre ...”

“... volume of their Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker point out that the nine-year run of the Dial alone amounts to ‘around 10,500 pages of text and 1200 pages of adverts, assuming an average of 300 words per page; this equals some 3.1 million words to read … about equivalent to reading 21 books ...”

“... ghosted memoir of her own and a reminiscence by the founder of her British fan club, David Nathan, and its secretary, Sylvia Hampton. Potential biographers might have been put off by the resistance of Simone’s daughter, who doesn’t want to talk about her mother, and many former friends and colleagues who refused to be interviewed or give ...”

“... of literary falconry and lightning perceptions the reportorial diligence and personal proximity of Andrew Kirtzman will have to do. A longtime New York journalist and television host, Kirtzman is the author of the thundering Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City (2000), to which this is the sequel. He possesses the salient advantage of having covered Giuliani ...”

“... to them. A Mind to Stay by Sydney Nathans deals with one small slice of that population. The book, Nathan’s life’s work (he began the interviews that led him to reconstruct this story forty years ago), is a marvellous example of how ‘microhistory’, based on a deep immersion in local sources, can illuminate broad historical patterns. It also suggests ...”

“... the idea of the Diary of James Schuyler might almost seem like too much of a good thing,’ begins Nathan Kernan’s introduction – too much because the poems have so much of the particular and the quotidian about them. The Art Writings – Schuyler followed Ashbery and O’Hara to Art News, and wrote for it, off and on, from 1955 to 1978 – show a ...”

“... at an Atlas-like critic and biographer in Exit Ghost, in which Roth’s familiar alter ego Nathan Zuckerman reviles ‘the dirt-seeking snooping calling itself research’ as ‘just about the lowest of literary rackets’. Roth seemed to find a spot in nearly every novel to insert a minor character based on somebody who had recently vexed him. That is ...”

“... be more of this. 23 May. Ros Chatto, my agent, calls to say I have been offered a role in the BBC Andrew Davies adaptation of Fanny Hill. She reads through this raunchy script finding no mention of the part for which I’m slated until she gets to the very final scene, where Fanny meets an old and respectable gentleman (me) whom she fucks to extinction, then ...”