As Dorothy Parker once said, New Yorkers like her ''take New York personally.'' What she meant, as she explained in a 1928 magazine essay, ''My Home Town,'' was that she felt tenderly ''maternal'' about the ''nervous and fevered and dashing place'' where she had lived most of her life and that anyone insulting the city would risk her vinegar wit....
''NEW YORK is now, as it has been since the 1850s, a global city, the archetype city of everyone's future,'' the novelist E. L. Doctorow wrote a decade ago. It's arguable, though, exactly if, and when, the city also became capital of the world and whether it still is. Nonetheless, David Wallace makes a compelling and appealing case in ''Capital of...

''The Letters of Noël Coward,'' a critically acclaimed book published by Alfred A. Knopf last year, includes a short, gossipy note from Coward on the subject of Julie Andrews. ''She is a bright, talented actress,'' Coward writes. ''And quite attractive since she dealt with her monstrous English overbite.'' But the letter, and another much like it,...