“... sat down to dinner in New York that evening, for sea bass at the Waldorf Astoria, Condoleezza Rice had been apprised of its contents. On its arrival in Washington, presumably after having been tested for anthrax, the letter was rapidly translated from the Farsi and judged for the purposes of public pronouncements to be ‘rambling’, empty of concrete ...”

“... which can be written on the back of a postage-stamp and names which can be written on a grain of rice. Formally, these minute objects are mirrored by ‘small’ poems, some no more than one sentence, some no more than two lines long. As a result of this repeated ‘zooming-in’ process, the reader experiences feelings of both intimacy (only when we know a ...”

“... The White House responded by pursuing the missile shield more intently: in early July, Condoleezza Rice travelled to Prague to sign a deal on radar facilities. On 9 and 10 July, according to the State Department’s press office, she was in the Georgian capital to ‘discuss Tbilisi’s Nato bid and the separatist conflicts’. Did she and Saakashvili discuss ...”

“... that could then be transferred to create an all-over pattern on a surface – often aluminium or rice paper. His winning gambit was to use black enamel and acrylic paints, unusual media that have the feel more of viscous printing ink than of paint. Some of the surfaces seem like decorative wrought iron, others might have been taken from a wallpaper pattern ...”

“... to place on record their sense of admiration for the dignity and courage displayed by Mr and Mrs John Profumo and their family in the quarter-century since the episode occurred. ‘This letter,’ they continued, ‘also records our feelings that it is now appropriate to consign the episode to history.’ It was an odd letter and I would be surprised if Lord ...”

“... the relations between authors and publishers never change. Dear Mr Murray, edited by David McClay (John Murray, £16.99), a collection of letters written to six generations of the Murray family, is full of familiar complaints. Jane Austen was ‘very much disappointed … by the delays of the printers’. Maria Rundell, author of A New System of Domestic ...”

“... going to get it done hard and fast and get out. Winning – as a famous old football coach called John Madden likes to say on his radio segment in San Francisco – is a great deodorant. But now they’re calling in the script doctors, fast. But wait. Here comes Osama’s right-hand no-good, Ayman al-Zawahiri, appearing on al-Jazeera with a picture of the ...”

“... the wilderness’. In Conan Doyle’s South American fantasia, The Lost World (1912), the explorer John Roxton is recognisably based on Fawcett, whose lectures in London Doyle had attended. He had ‘something of Don Quixote’, Doyle wrote, ‘and yet again something which was the essence of the English country gentleman’, and though his eyes twinkled there ...”

“... among journalist colleagues for taking his success too seriously.Woodward turned to the comedian John Belushi and another kind of fall: tragic early death. He wrote books about the CIA and the Pentagon, on Clinton and Alan Greenspan, carrying on at the Post as well, making a name for himself as a reporter and author others wished to emulate. He’d brought ...”

“... McCullough’s Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker. In the ...”

“... this sickly interlude U and I was a return to form. The book explored Baker’s relationship with John Updike, as writerly model, father figure to be challenged, and occasional sharer of the same physical space (the two men’s passing encounters couldn’t be said to constitute even acquaintance). U and I reduced Updike’s work to a mulch of remembered ...”

“... by Bill Clinton, and stayed on through 9/11 up until 2005, when he became the principal deputy to John Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence. In 2006, George W. Bush appointed him director of the CIA, where he stayed until 2009, when Barack Obama replaced him with Leon Panetta. During Hayden’s ten years at the top, the intelligence ...”

“... illumination, of the kind Visser’s book is full of. At the Last Supper, as we know, the apostle John lies ‘on Jesus’s breast’, but it seems we need not take this as any sign of special affection. Diners at a Jewish banquet would recline close together on a couch for two, each of them raised on his left elbow; and accordingly, to address one’s ...”

“... a novel agricultural technology based on new High Yield Varieties of staple crops such as wheat, rice and the like (HYVs, in the jargon). These have as their basic biological property high responsiveness to plant nutrients from both soil and photosynthesis. Following their development in Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s, HYVs have been the basis of scores of ...”

“... to commit suicide, but the coroner decided it was an accident. While the premature deaths of, say, John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath seemed somehow implicit in the trajectory of their careers, there was nothing remotely maudit about Jarrell, until the last couple of years of his life, when the approach of his 50th birthday induced a bout of ...”