“... pick,” Kellyanne Conway said on television, promising “big impact”.’ Meanwhile, John Bolton didn’t make the grade after his interview for the role of national security adviser, despite giving just the kind of responses that Trump preferred to hear. ‘His answers were fine, but Trump did not like his big, bushy moustache. He didn’t look ...”

“... childhood in West London, Merchant Taylors’ School, history and modern languages at St John’s College, Oxford, then an MBA at Insead. In 1997 he and Ian Wace launched the hedge fund Marshall Wace, with $50 million of seed capital raised from friends, family and George Soros. It now manages $69 billion in assets. Like many hedge fund ...”

“... was also able to attract support from Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Gore Vidal, Chester Bowles and John F. Kennedy. The right wing of the organisation was awash with antisemitism and Charles Lindbergh worship, but most of its followers eventually accepted the task of defeating Nazism. Arriving at Yale after the war, Buckley and his fellow conservative students ...”

“... viewed with dismay the lack of restraint and caution in O’Donovan Rossa’s violent rhetoric. John Devoy, one of the leaders of Clan na Gael, the main Irish nationalist organisation in America, believed, as Kenna writes, that O’Donovan Rossa ‘had given the British ample warning of his plans through a desire for notoriety and theatricality, thus ...”

“... just as the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon was doing in the United States. After all, John Scarlett, the present chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, was a mate of Alastair Campbell’s. Lord Hutton may not have found this significant, but I do. MI6 has long experience in the dissemination of forged documents to make a political case. In ...”

“... an assistant rhinoceros trader in ancient Athens called Ali Shah. How this might be connected to John Updike’s ‘Rabbit Remembered’, the last bit of fiction I’d read, I don’t know. Waking up, I thought the dream might be useful for Short Cuts and, taking the notebook and pencil I keep handy next to the bed, scribbled down the name ‘Ali ...”

“... he unequivocally dislikes; the only rough treatment meted out is reserved for a realist rival, John Berger. Sylvester is a lover and always seeking to make his reader understand his passion, whether it is for the turds in Gilbert and George’s ‘Naked Shit Pictures’ or Cy Twombly’s ‘scribbling and scattering’: ‘Such a painting is surely the ...”

“... have, I imagine, met those specifications. But the one who comes first to an American’s mind is John Dewey: a man whose engagement in primary and higher education, and whose active participation in politics, were considerably more extensive than Russell’s – and, I should argue, more focused, intelligent and useful. Dewey was the most prominent ...”

“... extracts from a video taken from an interview carried out by an eminent neurologist, Professor John Hodges, and presumably taped for research purposes. It’s sanctioned, one imagines, by John Bayley, whose efforts on behalf of his late wife and her reputation make Max Clifford seem timid and retiring. One lesson of this ...”

“... and dust in Sacramento would be like a plague or a curse – so that Joan’s new husband, John Gregory Dunne, when he came to visit, would use a mischievous finger to write ‘DUST’ here and there. Dunne, who died at the end of last year, was tall, handsome, articulate, funny – the man of the world behind whose attractive show Joan hid and ...”

“... I was hired​ as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man’s dong in print ...”

“... a quivering graduate student at Oxford in 1973, fresh from the Northern provinces, I sat for the John Locke Prize, a voluntary two-day examination for Oxford postgraduates in philosophy. As I had hitherto been a psychology student at Manchester, I thought this would be good practice for my upcoming B.Phil. philosophy exams. It was quite an ordeal (I nearly ...”

“... who light dirty and are sanctimonious about it: Lydia Lawrence and Meyers’s other bête noire, John Middleton Murry. Murry perhaps deserves what he gets (though one still wonders why Lawrence stuck to him for so long); but Lydia gets a biographical third degree. Her father is said to have ‘described himself as an engineer’ while actually being ‘a ...”

“... frees her from maternal tyranny and unlocks her emotions from the dungeon of Australian stoicism. John Pilger’s journey back to A Secret Country begins also in a state of nature, Bondi beach, where all are equal, the light has a diamond incandescence and life is ‘healthier and freer sexually than anywhere outside the Trobriand islands’. His remembrance ...”