“... for John Burnside You’d know her house by the drawn blinds – by the cormorants pitched on the boundary wall, the black crosses of their wings hung out to dry. You’d tell it by the quicken and the pine that hid it from the sea and from the brief light of the sun, and by Aonghas the collie, lying at the door where he died: a rack of bones like a sprung trap ...”

“... of their properties, is so striking, that they appear to be only varieties of the same species. Dr John Hunter i This ghostly archive, lined with labelled jars is full of light. Each pickled thing bleached to ivory sleeps in a glass flask of formaldehyde, shelves of pale stars that catalogue our strange bodies’ history. I like the cuttles and the moray ...”

“... for philosophical theories to possess this kind of pragmatic value. Ayer’s early minimalism, as John Foster shows, was the point of departure for much of his later, authoritative work in philosophy: it has largely determined his choice of subjects in the history of ideas – Moore, Russell, the Vienna Circle, the Pragmatists, Wittgenstein and now the ...”

“... in the world, creating a lot of wealth for Glasgow and a sky black with fumes. The next Tennant, John, went on developing, expanding and diversifying the business, which already had a branch in the City of London. A multi-millionaire by the age of 25, John was a typical early Victorian entrepreneur, perhaps not even all ...”

“... In 1598 John Florio called his dictionary A World of Words, and the joy of a new dictionary is the traveller’s joy, the joy of entering a new world, or at least a new state in some loose federal union, recognisably part of the same nation, but with its own eccentricities and prejudices, more rigid or more lax in licensing laws or taboos, more or less committed to conservation ...”

“... in Norbert Elias’s The Civilising Process, and doubtless elsewhere). Two centuries ago, when John Debrett became a miscellaneous publisher, his contemporary advice-givers had moved on to new fields; for example, offering a tip or two to a young lady newly ravaged by smallpox on how to hold on to her lover, with complementary advice to a gallant robbed of ...”

“... grandfather Stanley Howard Hodgkin (1860-1945), and Shelleys in East Sussex, which was owned by John Eliot Hodgkin (1829-1912) – and he remembered in detail rooms and the individuals and things that existed inside them. He played a parlour game with David Sylvester in which they challenged each other to remember the names and exact positions of paintings ...”

“... piece of evidence for the shop’s long ancestry is a document from the 1790s, which has John Buckingham – predecessor to two Arthur Beales, father and son – trading as a ‘hemp & flax dresser, tow dealer and rope maker at No. 12 Middle Row St Giles near Monmouth Street’, very close to the premises that have just been cleared. Alasdair ...”

“... them, they aren’t behind the bombings and the killing, they don’t know anything. The director, John Mackenzie, uses an elegant stylistic effect to make this point, so that we get it subliminally before we are anywhere near working out its contours. The camera keeps arriving at a scene – a country cottage seen from a small distance, the interior of the ...”

“... folksy song delivered over the credits by Glen Campbell, who had a role in the movie. It also had John Wayne at a late stage in his career, converting Cogburn into a genial version of a grizzled movie star acting tough while showing his heart of gold. Wayne got an Oscar for this performance, although ‘performance’ perhaps isn’t quite the word. Seen ...”

“... that the screenplay is by Pasolini, and so it is. But not in the same way that the screenplay for John Huston’s The Bible is by Christopher Fry, or for Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ by Paul Schrader. Pasolini hasn’t really written this movie, he has made excerpts from the gospel and filmed them, either as images in the manner we have ...”

“... which are often bedlam. High-minded modernist ideas and aspirations may have driven Colin St John Wilson to design his building as he did, but it’s the unruliness of some who go there that makes it appealingly lived in. Study describes what goes on inside, obviously – except, and equally obviously, when it doesn’t – but in its outward aspects the ...”

“... reading. Archer and Jockers are interested in the pumpkin plants – writers like Stephen King, John Grisham and Danielle Steel, perennial presences on the New York Times bestseller list – and what makes them sell so well. By looking only at textual features their machine has isolated the essence of the bestseller, Archer and Jockers believe, and can now ...”

“... is, or was, recognised by one kind of how-to-draw book. I have before me How to Draw Horses by John Skeaping, first published in 1941; this seventh impression is dated 1946. In the same series of twenty or so titles were How to Draw ‘Planes by Frank Wootton and Tanks and How to Draw Them by Terence Cuneo – both highly successful workers in long-lasting ...”

“... practice, streamlining the Mass and permitting its celebration in languages other than Latin. John XXIII, the pope who initiated the council in 1962, described it as an aggiornamento, a ‘bringing up to date’, an attempt to ‘throw open the windows of the church and let the fresh air of the Spirit blow through’.Much church politics over the last few ...”