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“... circles the new guides, with their unmistakably foreign approach, got a mixed reception. John Summerson, reviewing them for the New Statesman, felt a need to bring his readers, and indeed himself, round to the idea. ‘Books on the English counties’ had, as he said, ‘come rather thick since the war’. The others, of varying quality, tended to be ...”

“... how this ‘Moriarty of the book world’ met his match in a duo of intrepid young book dealers, John Carter and Graham Pollard, whose investigation is ‘worthy of fiction’. The ‘impossibly debonaire’ Carter, with his immaculately pressed Savile Row suits, could easily be a real-life counterpart of Dorothy L. Sayers’s fictional sleuth Lord Peter ...”

“... about middle-aged women suffering. They were Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), John McGahern’s The Barracks (1961) and Aidan Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down (1966). It is no coincidence, either, that the best novels about men in the period after independence dealt with figures in extreme and exquisite isolation, as in the novels of Beckett ...”

“... unit, set square to the prevailing on-shore winds. The occupier, New York-born to a childhood in John Cheever commuting country, now reinvented as a Vietnam-vintage Irish citizen, removes all the offending oil paintings from the wall: jewelled landscapes in oil; lively, naive renderings of the headland on which the cottages have been built. Expressionist ...”

“... substantial minority under 18th-century mortality levels. At some point in their lives Adam Smith, John Miller, William Robertson and David Hume began to question the theology in which they had been reared: Camic is convinced that ‘their revolution was a union of circumstances’ – in other words, that it was their rearing which freed them for it. That ...”

“... it takes up themes from Derrida’s previous writing, notably from Limited Inc, his exchange with John Searle on the topic (supposedly) of speech-act philosophy; and that Signsponge is perhaps his most extravagant text to date, judged by all the normal, reputable standards of literary-critical practice. But having said all this one has really done no more ...”

“... industrial societies’ ordinary members of the public are protected by bureaucracy from major crises (for example, famine, plague) and have been trained to exercise self-control when minor crises threaten. Indeed ‘self-control’ has become part of the individual’s built-in personality structure. ‘Social rituals and ceremonies at weddings and ...”

“... of a fine new biography, Gabriele D’Annunzio: Defiant Archangel. Perhaps immodestly, its author, John Woodhouse, who teaches Italian at Oxford, says in his Preface: ‘This is the first fully documented biography of Gabriele D’Annunzio in any language, and, within the limits of reason, given the bizarre nature of D’Annunzio’s career, the first ...”

“... even imperfect FRT can be useful. Suppose you have just photographed a man who claims to be John Smith. How can a computer establish whether he is the same John Smith who exists in your database? First, it needs to find the man’s face in the picture – by looking for blob-like regions with consistent brightness and ...”

“... is demonstrated by a range of imitations and borrowings made by other dramatists, among them John Marston, Thomas Middleton (most spectacularly in The Revenger’s Tragedy, 1606) and John Fletcher. In his Jew’s Tragedy, written in the 1620s, William Heminges even includes the line ‘To be, or not to be, I, there’s ...”

“... Iran. In addition to the CIA estimates, Richelson relies primarily on standard works – John W. Lewis and Xue Litai’s China Builds the Bomb (1988), George Perkovich’s India’s Nuclear Bomb (1999), Seymour Hersh’s The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy (1991) – which he supplements with memoirs and ...”

“... guinea pigs. In 1822, the illiterate young French-Canadian was working as a ‘voyageur’ for John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading company in northern Michigan. He was hanging out with a bunch of rowdies in the company store when a shotgun accidentally went off and he was hit below his left nipple. The injury was serious and likely to be fatal – his ...”

“... of baguette between her teeth so you can’t see her smile. Back in the US, Bouvier got engaged to John Husted, a Wall Street stockbroker, but once her mother learned that he earned just $17,000 a year, the engagement was called off. She made gestures towards an entry-level position at the CIA and won the Paris Prize at Vogue – six months working at the ...”

“... sides. We are going to live in a garret.’) The forthcoming marriage occasioned a long letter to John Hilton, a schoolfriend who offered to intercede between MacNeice and his prospective in-laws, the Beazleys. It comes as a relief and a shock to read it. Here, at last, is the intimate voice: here goes: Apologia pro Vita Mea. Only not even an apologia. (You ...”

“... of a ‘new world-epoch’, but the death of an old one: Natty is in his seventies, and Indian John, as Chingachgook is called by the residents of Templeton, a frontier settlement based on the Cooperstown of the novelist’s childhood, is a sad shadow of the Mohican warrior he once was, especially in the Christmas tavern scene in which he partakes a little ...”