“... Iklé, who headed the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under President Ford; and Stansfield Turner, President Carter’s Director of Central Intelligence. Particularly prominent among Schell’s interviewees are several retired military officers whose duties required them to manage nuclear weapons, such as General George Lee Butler, the former commander ...”

“... an elaborate theatrical spectacle, appealing to the emotions instead of reason. At the centre of John Barrell’s exhaustive study of treason in the mid-1790s is a brilliantly sustained argument about the struggle to fix the character of the word ‘imagination’. Unlike the battle then being fought over such important political terms as ...”

“... for future projects: Red Shift, a publishing imprint, after the Alan Garner novel; an essay on John Akomfrah’s film triptych The Unfinished Conversation, featuring the memories of Stuart Hall; a book of essays about Kanye West. These interests are all evident in Fisher’s work too.The second memorial lecture was given in January by the American ...”

“... a stormy night with the discovery of a dead man in a barn, carrying papers that identify him as “John Whitaker”,’ Macintyre writes. ‘By dint of some distinctly plodding detective work, Inspector Richardson discovers that every document in the pockets of the dead man has been ingeniously forged: his visiting cards, his bills, and even his passport, on ...”

“... for a more discriminating understanding of the texts. Both taught and published in America. John Unrau and Jeanne Clegg have enabled us to see Ruskin’s relations with Venice in a new light: one works in Canada, the other in Italy. Important collections of correspondence (Bradley’s editions of the letters from Venice and the Cowper-Temple ...”

“... of years earlier, Sticky My Fingers, Fleet My Feet, a short film I’d written with the director John Hancock about touch football in Central Park, had been nominated for an Oscar. (It played with Woody Allen’s Bananas at New York’s Baronet Theatre to brisk business.) In a giddy moment, we’d even taken out one of those bow-wow fuck-off ads in Variety ...”

“... the State, and Law and Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, but with its great and terrifying sweeps of synthesis – not to mention their calm, dry, paddingly Socratic delivery – commonly assumed to be the work mainly of Hall. Everywhere the ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ of the ...”

“... the photographs and, above all, in the index, which, for instance, suggests discreetly that both John McCain and Barack Obama indulged in adulterous liaisons with Lupe Vélez, the most fiery of Johnny Weissmuller’s five wives. The conceit is that the index was compiled before the lawyers looked at the manuscript, and remains unrevised after their ...”

“... he set out. What seemed false had become true.Qā’sElid had inadvertently become what Malcolm John Rebennack Jr, in his first work as Dr John, billed as the ‘last of the best’:They call me the gris-gris manGot many clients, come from miles around,Running down my prescriptionI got medicine to cure all y’alls ills,I ...”

“... It probably doesn’t help that the IPs we get to hear about are usually the celebrities: Elton John and David Furnish; Annie Leibovitz; Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Surrogacy is one of those subjects on which ‘colour-blind – white – feminism’ tends not to mince words. ‘A human-rights violation’, the journalist Julie Bindel called it in 2018 ...”

“... of her first novel behind her, Bedford got a contract to write an entire book about the trial of John Bodkin Adams – the Harold Shipman of his time – at the Old Bailey that year. The book begins with the judge’s entrance, ‘trailing a wake of subtlety, of secret powers, age’ and ends three and a half weeks later with the not guilty verdict. In ...”

“... possible without its layers and hyperlinks, the infinite opportunities it opens for research: on John Amos Comenius, for example, whose idea of ‘pansophism … a dream of information available to everyone’ she discusses as a precursor to ‘Wikipedia, which I admire and support’. In The Books of Jacob, the news about the mycelial origins of the world ...”

“... stage-managed by Scott) – opposite the playbill for a production in 1823 of Shakespeare’s King John at the Theatre Royal, which boasted an ‘Attention to Costume never before equalled on the English Stage’. A playbill for a production of Shakespeare’s ‘King John’ in 1823. The century before Scott’s The ...”

“... to know something about the history of painting. Disappointingly, the English 19th century after Turner seemed to be beneath the girlfriend’s notice, and when we walked around the Russell-Cotes one vacation, I found myself beginning to feel uncomfortable with the derision she clearly felt for most of what was in the museum, however snide I had been about ...”

“... and Girtin (who died young), and eventually reaching a triumphant climax with the work of J.M.W. Turner. The Great Age of British Watercolours 1750-1880, on view at the Royal Academy until 12 April, sets out to recycle this rather tired old story in a manner that remains remarkably faithful to the spirit of the original, despite the occasional difference in ...”