“On a frigid, lightly snowing night in late January 1917, Marcel Duchamp, John Sloan, and four other tipsy Villagers climbed to the top of Washington Square Arch and declared Greenwich Village a free and independent republic.”

“Nabokov's reputation as a novelist, scholar, translator, and lepidop­terist is unassailable, but not many people know that he was also a great teacher (on the other hand, those of us who took his courses in the early '50s didn't have the vaguest notion he'd written a single word of fiction)”