“... for John Banville Hello Hello Hello Hello what shall we do today? Hello Today. They come in procession: clown, princess, scarecrow, ghost, a drift of the overgrown: women in their institutional white socks and black shoes, winter coats over nighties, sheets, sack-dresses, party hats, paper-bag masks with eye-holes and straw, hard plastic masks with white elastic: cat, devil, crone ...”

“... are              more or less a severe critic said              of John Ashbery.How to shape an hour, chart a flow.Corbin v. corvid: whose              etymologies win today,              whose orthographies are rising.Let’s follow a kingfisher down the long shoreextravagant with brush and unseen ...”

“... to study if they didn’t want to. There were no marks or prizes, and no punishments were imposed. John Betjeman described it as ‘a co-educational school to which modern authors and intellectuals send their sons’. Freud had no interest in academic subjects. Instead, he was fascinated by horses, and remained fascinated all of his life. One of his school ...”

“... the man whom he succeeds’. His decision to travel to Dublin shortly after his election to meet John Bruton reinforced the view that he was a Unionist of the new school. He has ‘briskly proved himself a true moderniser’, a Guardian leader concluded warmly. ‘The Molyneaux culture will seem extraordinarily remote and anachronistic.’ Word was ...”

“... It was the dramatisation of a book; and though the play does not survive, the book does. John Hayward’s The First Part of the Life and Reign of King Henry IV was published in February 1599. It begins with the reign of Richard II, and reaches the end of the first year of Henry’s reign. As its printer John Wolfe ...”

“... and drop unhurt. I saw it done myself but by a man of rather athletic build.’Joyce’s friend John Francis Byrne, on whom he based the character of Cranly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, lived at 7 Eccles Street from 1908 to 1910. ‘In 1909, when Joyce was visiting Dublin,’ we are told on page 1144 of the new volume of annotations to ...”

“... as though they meant it, as though they meant it to matter ... Samuel Beckett (of course), John Berger, Christine Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy, Anthony Burgess, Alan Burns, Angela Carter, Eva Figes, Giles Gordon, Wilson Harris, Rayner Heppenstall, even hasty, muddled Robert Nye, Ann Quin, Penelope Shuttle, Alan Sillitoe (for his last book only. Raw ...”

“... it had been destroyed.As it turned out, however, there was much more to come. In the late 1970s, John Marks, a journalist who specialised in intelligence matters, filed a Freedom of Information request that uncovered a trove of 16,000 documents, most of which hadn’t been sent for shredding because they were filed as financial records. In the course of ...”

“... but as home secretary he came into his own.One of Sidmouth’s spies, a man called John Castle, was on the action committee responsible for organising the huge and supposedly peaceful meeting of reformers on Spa Fields that was to be addressed by the mellifluous Orator Hunt. Castle tirelessly whipped up the labourers who had just been laid off ...”

“... character’ of language. That phrase comes in the title of a deeply representative book by John Wilkins. It is altogether fitting that a leading figure in the Royal Society should have been preoccupied by such inquiries. One recalls that in the Grand Academy of Lagado the mechanical operation of words figures more largely than experiments with mice ...”

“... with more than 50 per cent of the votes cast in their constituencies, 44 (including Tony Blair and John Prescott) were elected with over 70 per cent, and two with over 80 per cent. By contrast, only 14 Conservatives won more than 50 per cent of the votes cast. The most successful Conservative, John Major in ...”

“... John Berger’s selected essays run to nearly six hundred pages, yet that is just the tip of the iceberg if one looks at the totality of his published work: the essays and reviews about the visual arts – drawing, painting, photography, film – but also short stories, journals, screenplays, travel articles, letters, television scripts, translations, novels, poems, even a requiem in three parts which gives a wrenching account of the untimely deaths of three of Berger’s neighbours ...”

“... sunrise at Stonehenge. How was that image created? The Stonehenge connection goes back to John Aubrey, who first recognised the monuments at Avebury in 1649 and then spent nearly fifty years writing and talking about, but never quite finishing, his projected Templa Druidum. He was followed by William Stukeley, Anglican clergyman and ‘pagan ...”

“... instincts and her reputation (not entirely deserved) for outspokenness. However, her successor, John Major, succumbed to the temptations of saloon-bar moralism when he launched his Back to Basics campaign at the 1993 Tory Party Conference. Major remains insistent that Back to Basics did not amount to a moral crusade. It was Peter Lilley and ...”

“... of dream and reverie was already familiar. As far back as 1701, the doctor and opium enthusiast John Jones said of the intoxicated (and intoxicating) state it brought about that ‘people do commonly call it a heavenly condition, as if no worldly Pleasure was to be compared with it’; and indeed Jones went further than De Quincey ever would in describing ...”