“... the latter-day champion of ‘fundamental freedoms’ Mr Justice Laws curtail in his long stint as John Laws QC, the Thatcher Government’s chief court lawyer? Joshua Rozenberg’s not entirely original view is that elected politicians should make the laws and judges should administer them. He advises the two sides to stop attacking each other: politicians ...”

“... in modern art. Reading Gaston, I was reminded repeatedly of paintings by Lawrence Alma-Tadema and John William Waterhouse. Pater’s interest in these works might help us to understand their appeal not only to his contemporaries, but to audiences today. Queen Margaret of Navarre is first mentioned in the novel with a Greek quotation that links her to ...”

“... reached a decision that President Andrew Jackson disliked, Jackson is said to have remarked: ‘John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.’) If the court’s decisions are not seen as legitimate, its power could fade.Stephen Breyer, a Supreme Court justice since 1994, is concerned that this power is under threat. In his new book, The ...”

“... Studying poetry spilled over naturally into writing it: Garfitt went to informal workshops with John Wain and Peter Levi, heard Ted Hughes read at the Poetry Society. Coghill read his poems, but wasn’t very enthusiastic; Peter Jay took a photo of him in a green silk smoking jacket looking ‘just like Rupert Brooke!’; he talked about jazz with Robert ...”

“... successfully – most recently in a triumphant Broadway True West, with Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly alternating the two main roles – and last year also saw the publication of the very useful Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard.* But his later plays have often seemed clotted, hyper-masculine, forced, and his ventures into movie direction – Far ...”

“... or in Brussels, confronting herself, playing with Chomskyan grammar (the famous test sentences ‘John is easy/eager to please’ are a running gag). There is much linguistic chatter, for she loves language to the point of enjoying bad puns and doing a good deal of unrepentant punning herself, the pun being a model of the natural instability of ...”

“... so he acquaints himself with this ‘testicular view’. One story in particular strikes him: John Cheever’s ‘The Country Husband’. The force of it disorients him, he realises, because in twenty sad, brilliant pages it demolishes the allure of the things for which he most longs: ‘husbandhood and fatherhood and a certain kind of woman who attached ...”

“... the belief P is a constituent of the belief P&Q; and it is not an accident that the sentence ‘John prefers coffee’ is a constituent of the sentence ‘John prefers coffee in the morning.’ If you have an executive, you can (maybe) make sense of all that. If not, then – so far as anyone knows – you ...”

“... I owe my years as a jazz reporter to John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which made the British cultural establishment of the mid-1950s take notice of a music so evidently dear to the new and talented Angry Young Men. When, needing some money, I saw that Kingsley Amis wrote in the Observer on a subject about which he obviously knew no more and possibly less than I did, I called a friend at the New Statesman ...”

“... her jewel box, while on a bench outside two young women wait with an older man (who resembles John D. Rockefeller Jr) to handle their own treasures. In the central rank, a vast hangar is filled with shrouded figures on the floor overseen by another guard (the near twin of the one below). Finally, in the top level, above an elevated platform where an ...”

“... of the Bible Belt, a movement whose votes every Republican president since Reagan has depended on. John McCain is the party’s first presidential candidate in forty years who hasn’t secured the evangelical vote. H.L. Hunt, according to one of his enemies, ‘would be the most dangerous man in America if he wasn’t such a damn hick’. Hick or not, he was ...”

“... one voice sings. These madrigals display the individual voice very differently from those of, say, John Dowland (who was ten years younger than Monteverdi). From the 1580s to 1620, Dowland wrote wonderfully for the single voice. He was a consummate polyphonist, but his music was informed by his knowledge of his own instrument – the lute – whereas ...”

“... publishers in the 1960s. The one anomaly in Harwood’s bibliography is his inclusion, along with John Ashbery and Tom Raworth, in Volume 19 of the Penguin Modern Poets series, published in 1971. The groupings that Penguin came up with in this admirable series tended to be hit or miss. But the combination of Ashbery, Harwood and Raworth is an interesting ...”

“... literary couple exchanging enthusiasms and ideas with an effervescence that is implicitly sexual. John Dunton, a later and better known bookseller, developed this format when he founded the first literary magazine, the Athenian Mercury, in 1694. His find was a young woman from Somerset, Elizabeth Singer, who sent in poems praising King William. She was hailed ...”

“... out to evoke the fluid, improvised nature of dreaming. The title he borrows is a give-away: in John Lennon’s bland song about a disappointed love affair there is an uncertainty about what has been made up: ‘was it just a dream . . . seemed so very real’. But the long stretches in which Eiji makes things up are often inconsequential and slow down ...”