“... Philippe de Champaigne gave when his daughter became a Jansenist nun – a Mary Magdalene and a John the Baptist – are in the exhibition. Neil MacGregor’s catalogue notes shed light on the choice of saints and make sense of their decorous presentation and of the place art could have among the spiritually frugal. St ...”

“... that have been deposited at Cumberland Gate. In a poem written for a BBC documentary in 1968, John Betjeman described the site as a place of martyrdom ‘trodden by unheeding feet’. The ‘greatest crime’ of all, he continued, standing on the roof of Marble Arch and speaking in the voice of a genteel, if irritable prophet, is ‘the martyrdom of ...”

“... Bloodaxe version). Its most fervent admirer among those who plug it in its many blurbs is John Berger, who writes: I live in France. I take this book everywhere with me. And almost every day I find myself opening it to translate a poem to somebody after a discussion or a joke or a conversation. Maybe to a Polish building worker, maybe to two ...”

“... Work by 18 of the photographers with whom John Pilger has collaborated over the last thirty or forty years is on show in Reporting the World, at the Barbican Gallery until 30 September. The exhibition is a record of events we remember – vaguely or clearly – having followed and others that we didn’t follow, even if we tell ourselves now that we did ...”

“... A facsimile of the Rosenbach manuscript – a fair copy of the text of Ulysses which Joyce sent to John Quinn in instalments between 1920 and 1922 – came out in 1975. Having argued unsuccessfully that the ‘underlying materials’ were implicitly published with the first edition, the defence then said that the amount copied was little enough not to ...”

“... where one can.In his recent book Dick: The Man who Is President (New Press, £14.99), John Nichols, the Nation’s Washington correspondent, makes a persuasive case for the (by now fairly familiar) idea that the vice-presidency is the real locus of power in the current US administration: Cheney runs the show and pulls the strings while the ...”

“... as mime artists must. And they remain so. By Canto xxv, in the Heaven of the Fixed Stars, where John the Evangelist explains the disembodied nature of beings in Paradise, there is no doubt that Beatrice is a very material girl, her right leg bent, and forward just a touch, her left leg braced under a sidling hip.The celebrity appearances by Adam and Saints ...”

“... was intertwined with his. It would be helpful to have explanations of Lucy Porter, Hill Boothby, John Taylor and the Thrales, as major figures in Johnson’s life and letter-writing. The notes are self-referential in a cryptic way, with a delicately archaic use of ante and post; these are not as helpful as the editor thinks, for the reader who is reading ...”

“... war broke out, Cantos 52 to 71, known to initiates as the Chinese History Cantos followed by the John Adams Cantos, seem to him as to many of us wrongly conceived as well as sloppily executed. His dislike of them takes a special turn, however, when for the failure of the Adams sequence he blames John Adams, not ...”

“... he appears before me, I could not stop myself kissing him.’ Unlike his tight-fisted father, King John, Henry was generous to a fault, showering all around him with precious rings, brooches, luxurious robes, huge consignments of firewood and deer from his forests. The gifts he received from others he regifted, also on a heroic scale. When he ran out of cash ...”

“... might fantasise about what it was like, but to go further was dangerous. In 1318, a man called John, perhaps the son of an Exeter tanner, appeared at Oxford’s north gate claiming that he was the rightful king of England. John said that he was Edward I’s true first-born son, swapped out in the cradle by a negligent ...”

“... schoolboy could be the next prime minister doesn’t cross either of our minds. On the other hand, John Birt is suitably impressed when I tell him that I actually met the great Lord Reith on the day of his extraordinary speech in the House of Lords likening commercial broadcasting to the Black Death. It was as if I’d said to the present Chief of the Defence ...”

“... an unmistakable resemblance to Coward. Hall’s heroine Stephen Gordon (Radclyffe Hall was called John for most of her adult life) knows that Brockett, a playwright with soft white hands and an effeminate voice, is a man ‘who would never require more of her than she could give’. When they visit Versailles together he talks to her about Marie Antoinette ...”

“... have been massive: Roy Jenkins’s weighed in at 1.5 kilos and a thousand pages. A great virtue of John Keegan’s is its brevity. Here is the saga in miniature. Keegan’s Churchill is pre-eminently a man of war and a man of words. The Army made him physically, intellectually and morally – Sandhurst and the years in India and Africa ‘must be counted among ...”

“... the whodunnit in which the puzzle apparently remains unsolved. Did O’Brien’s protagonist, John Wade, murder his wife? Or not? And what happens to Wade himself? O’Brien does not tell you – at least not directly. The conundrum has so confounded most American reviewers that, after a few lines detailing the primary components of the central plot ...”