“... 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 ...”

“... and Chekhov’. By this point, White was trying to get a deal to write a book of criticism on John Barth, Robert Coover, Rudolph Wurlitzer and Donald Barthelme. The proposal was rejected. Though ‘crushed at the time’, White was later glad, because metafiction ‘no longer intrigues’ him ‘or anyone else’. It’s ‘the sort of storytelling,’ he ...”

“... of his rage at intrusions into his privacy, and one remembers him forcing the withdrawal of John Peter’s article from Essays in Criticism because it suggested a homosexual element in his relationship with Jean Verdenal. Lyndall Gordon reports a conversation with Mary Trevelyan which makes him seem mildly amused about this imputation, but his first ...”

“... as one soon learns from the letters he wrote to his son Pierre in the 1930s and 1940s (quoted in John Russell’s Matisse: Father and Son) – even the old Matisse was far from the calm, masterful presence one might have imagined, anxious as he was as a father and misunderstood, so he thought, as a husband. For the evidence of his art and his life to add ...”

“... they discerned the ‘colouring’ and ‘diction’ of Shakespeare’s younger contemporary John Fletcher, rather than Shakespeare himself, in the play. Others objected that as for ‘the tale of this play being built upon a novel in Don Quixote, chronology is against us, and Shakespeare could not be the author.’ This last, at least, Theobald was able ...”

“... of men like Eliot. But I find it much more strongly represented in such a post-Eliot poet as John Ashbery, who seems to me a true poet of distraction. The back cover of the 1985 paperback of his pleasing and elegant Selected Poems carries a handful of laudatory quotations from previous reviews. What is remarkable is how often they reflect, presumably ...”

“... absent from the Longman edition, we must turn to the 20-volume California edition of The Works of John Dryden, compiled by generations of editors, and published serially between 1956 and 2000). Likewise, and no less justifiably, the prose is absent; save for the prose passages which prefaced or dedicated poems or volumes of poems, such as the ‘Discourse ...”