“... and there was nothing like empire to give vanity rocket-like lift. In Karsh’s photograph of John Buchan, who was governor of Canada in the 1930s, the wildly popular novelist wears a North American Indian war bonnet, his weathered face is in semi-profile, he’s wearing gloves, and he looks as if he could take on an army on his own. Sargent’s portrait ...”

“... of White House lawyers, David Addington, Timothy Flanigan and Alberto Gonzales, with support from John Yoo at the Justice Department, who set about granting the president as many extraordinary powers as Cheney thought he needed. First up was intercepting, without a warrant, communications to and from the United States (an action forbidden under federal law ...”

“... precedents are not promising. The most recent example of minority government at Westminster is John Major’s in 1996-97; before that there was the Wilson-Callaghan Labour administration of 1974-79 and Ramsay MacDonald’s of 1929-31. In each case, the government reeled from crisis to crisis, eventually limping into a terrible election defeat that ...”

“... the story of the Algiers Motel killings, already the subject of several books, including one by John Hersey published in 1968. A young cop fires at a looter, and defends himself not on the grounds that the victim was armed or even that he could have been, but that he might have done something else unlawful during the rioting. The victim later dies, and we ...”

“... clay was provided for free.) It looked as if she might do anything. But then, in 1953, she met John Bratby. The year after they got together and got married – it took a week – Bratby finished his studies at the Royal College of Art and, thanks to a famous essay by David Sylvester in Encounter, found himself at the head of a movement. ‘Everything but ...”

“... that you had gone.’ He can’t write enough poetry to make anyone happy. To the publisher John Rodker, who wants to issue a volume of new poems, he confesses sheepishly: ‘I am sorry for the misunderstanding. I don’t think there is enough new stuff for more than 25 pages, but perhaps I shall have more by the end of June. I hope so.’ Elementary ...”

“... I discover, admitted to his French translator that he had never spent much time in Shropshire), John Clare, A.A. Milne, Shelley, Blake, Eliot (Macavity, not Prufrock) and – thanks to Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes’s Rattle Bag, and Geoffrey Grigson’s anthology Unrespectable Verse – a swarm of lesser-known poets.Among these has been Charles ...”

“... take, shivering out there under the helium lamps. Another crap, over-budget homage to Hammett and John Alton, Magyar master of the shadow game: fog, steam and smoke, bad news behind the slatted blinds, the half-illumined face and pistol’s report. Exhausted, feeling a little debauched after too much weasel, cop and tough, good time Mabel, down on her ...”

“... capital sniffing out the news. Writers like H. R. Knickerbocker, Malcolm Muggeridge, Eugene Lyons, John Gunther and Walter Duranty were our eyes and cars in the world. The milieux in which these men functioned in the Twenties and Thirties were turbulent and romantic. Moving constantly between Paris, Berlin and Moscow, they knew each other; they frequented the ...”

“... morals to aesthetics in a challenging new-old fashion. And it’s a question, as ever with John Banville, within other questions. Who, for instance, you’re made to wonder at this point in Ghosts, is actually asking? Some anonymous narrator? The author? The novel’s own enigmatic ‘evil man’, the one who does so much of its telling and, it turns ...”

“... feel, blush for it. Mostly they contradict it. The style of interesting poets like Peter Didsbury, John Ash, Pauline Stainer and one of the editors, Michael Hulse, is not particularly ‘democratic’, but playfully enigmatic and donnish. There is a tendency to think aloud with a somewhat creaky jauntiness, as if the poets were sharing secrets with their ...”

“... a matter of natural and wholesome professional sympathies. Stella Tillyard is married to historian John Brewer who helped Schama with Citizens, as the author warmly acknowledges in the Introduction; and there is further scholarly harmony in the fact that Tillyard, in her Preface, shows that she agrees with the views of Schama, and, increasingly, others, about ...”

“... moment is Yeats’s dishevelled plea to his sweetheart Maud Gonne not to marry the loutish John MacBride, who was to become one of the executed rebels of the Easter Rising. Here, under intense emotional pressure, Yeats’s spelling packs up almost completely, along with his grammar and syntax, collapsing into a garbled semiosis which Julia Kristeva ...”

“... life by dying in a good cause in Greece) and who considered his confessions to be, in the words of John Cam Hobhouse, ‘fit only for a brothel’. Mr Nye’s book is an exercise in literary reconstruction, and hence in the revision of a character. It traces the career of our ...”

“... pages long, the composition of which began with Richards’s knowledge and with his co-operation. John Paul Russo explains his side of this: ‘My probe of the hegemonic anti-biographical, anti-historical bias in New Criticism led me to one of its main sources in Richards. I intended to elucidate as systematically as possible the historical, biographical and ...”