“... a taste for highly creative writing should seek out A.E. Housman: New Poems [sic] ed. [sic] by John Edmunds, with a preface and notes by Hilary Bacon (San Francisco, 1985).Every word, bracket and comma here is so entirely to the point that it is virtually a prose-poem in the genre that Housman made his own: the almost deadpan burlesque of poor ...”

“... even the worst. What kind of further improvement workers were looking for is considered by José Harris in the light of local inquiries for a survey commissioned by Beveridge and carried out by G.D.H. Cole in 1941-42. It seems that the man in the street’s hopes were less ambitious than the Beveridge Plan which followed: there is no evidence that ...”

“... Allowed to read this work, Juliette, who had come on a bit, suggested it should be retitled ‘John Thomas and Lady Jane’, an idea which Lawrence liked but his publishers resisted. Trouble began when Julian on a voyage to Africa met a pretty American girl in the ever-fatal Red Sea. It was to be no passing fancy and he demanded that his wife should rise ...”

“... when it deals with the world at large. The sentence in the chapter on the military budget, by John Blackaby, is surely a candidate for the saying of the year: ‘The Soviet Union is a long way away.’ To recommend, on the one hand, a systematic violation of the Treaty of Rome by an import surcharge, and, on the other, the permanent vetoing of ...”

“... Changes Trains, 1935, and Goodbye to Berlin, 1939), Isherwood writes not only of finding in Julie Harris someone who ‘was more essentially Sally Bowles than the Sally of my book’, but also of his own disappearance into fiction. As he watches the rehearsals for I Am a Camera, the play John van Druten made from the ...”

“... biographies (of the queen and Princess Diana). Junor, however, is a career journalist, daughter of John Junor, the former editor in chief of the Sunday Express, and she is much closer to her material. She has written two lives of Charles and one each of Diana, Prince William and Prince Harry, as well as a group portrait of ‘the troubled life of the House of ...”

“... who Trump believed had cost him the popular vote in 2016. The census bureau’s chief scientist, John Abowd, estimated that at least 630,000 households (mainly Asian Americans and Latinos) were likely to be deterred, resulting in fewer congressional seats (and electoral college votes) as well as reduced federal spending in Democrat-leaning states. The ...”

“... designed and marketed male style from Playboy to Carnaby Street. Alistair O’Neill’s article on John Stephen, ‘The King of Carnaby Street’, for example, shows how Stephen successfully adapted a gay style to the mass heterosexual menswear market in the 1960s. Indeed, men’s clothing choices in general seem to produce a wider range of ambiguous ...”

“... to say rival) in this quest is Scott Eyman, an American expert in movie history. His book on John Wayne from 2014 is extraordinary for its revelation of awkwardness in a cinema celebrity. Eyman has also written excellent books on Ernst Lubitsch, Cecil B. DeMille and John Ford, and about the moment when sound changed ...”

“... ten in the pipeline (including Golden Hillock and another Trojan Horse school, Oldknow), and Harris, which has 36 academies and another four on the way. A less successful chain is E-Act, which had 31 academies in 2013. Last year, Ofsted inspected 16 of its schools and found that ‘an overwhelming proportion of pupils … were not receiving a good ...”

“... of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various reflections on the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon’s death; a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing ...”

“... prices too, chief justices, lords lieutenant, lords mayor, George Moore, Sir William Orpen, Sir John Lavery, Walter Osborne, Jack Yeats, my famous namesake his brother Bill, Padraic Colum, John Millington Synge, young painters like Paddy Tuohy who really did paint old J.S. Joyce and died of his own hand, poor Sean ...”

“... a kaleidoscope with an attractive new pattern and with himself at the centre of it. In Kenneth Harris’s book of extended interviews with him, which must have been largely completed before the election and hastily updated since, Dr Owen lays emphasis on what he sees as two early betrayals of the SDP: the conversations which David Steel and I had with Bill ...”

“... and truth’. This is baloney of the order once spoken by the mendacious Jonathan Aitken. Rolf Harris, an ignorant nation’s best-known painter, soon to become the people’s paedophile, was commissioned by the BBC to make a Bayswater Road portrait of the queen for her eightieth birthday. Lucian Freud’s 2001 portrait is, on the other hand, simply a ...”

“... a different narrative in a principal narrative – witness the Odyssey and the Gospels (Salome and John the Baptist). Johnson’s plan to revolutionise the novel came down to the use of ‘devices’ intended to disrupt ordinary forms of attention by involving the physical book itself, the material base of writing, in unusual ways, as if to take revenge on it ...”