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“... and thinks for an awful moment it is her lover who has been killed – their names both being John. A moment’s reflection will show the utter absurdity of this, in terms of ordinary human emotion, but it is an effective and traditional dramatic stroke, dovetailed into a modern setting in such a way that it seems to reveal the ‘truth’ about modern ...”

“... Forest with a guest appearance by Sterne, Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, a John Martin and a Turner, with snatches of poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, and echoes of De Quincey, Shelley, Frankenstein (not sure about that); and then on to Samuel Palmer to Wuthering Heights to Ford Madox Brown to George Eliot to Whistler to Edwin Drood ...”

“... and his evidently courteous exchanges with recent custodians of the project (Robert Burchfield, John Simpson, Edmund Weiner) Willinsky detects a quaint mixture of ‘afternoon tea and high-speed computer searches’. His conclusion is friendly, but a little condescending: ‘All told, the OED’s literary, prosaic and omitted citations authorise a ...”

“... had joined in, 18th-century cricket allowed of a certain provisional democracy. In 1744, Lord John Sackville, the third Duke of Dorset’s uncle, turned out for Kent in a game at the Artillery Ground against a team labelled ‘England’, scored a disappointing 5 and 0 in the two innings but made an important catch (he surely won’t have done any ...”

“... the armies are the Jacobite Highlanders and the Hanoverian forces under Lieutenant General Sir John Cope. Duffy is giving a fair signal of the minute military history to come and a display of what he does best: the careful explanation of tactics (and tactical errors); the arrangement of eyewitness accounts; the painstaking analysis of the effects of ...”

“... Hone had also just written and published three parodies of the Book of Common Prayer: The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism of a Ministerial Member, The Political Litany and The Sinecurists’ Creed, which satirised the venality of Tory MPs willing to say, vote for and even believe whatever their ministers told them to in exchange for the sinecures and ...”

“... A few months before his early death from tuberculosis, John Keats scribbled these lines in his papers: This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm’d – see, here it is I hold it towards you ...”

“... take long for all that to change. In a book full of closely observed incident and character, John Kampfner describes a zadvorkia, or courtyard party, which he happened upon in Central Moscow soon after Yeltsin won the Russian Presidency in June 1991: ‘I had stumbled on the nouveaux riches, the New Russians as they came to be known, at play for the ...”

“... Hierarchy of the Unexpected There is still something I’d like to explain, yet can’t be sure I’m ready yet. Beside, we’ve done pretty well with the non-sequiturs, and they by us, don’t you think? Next time I recognise one I’ll call you, but will you hear me? Will I suddenly find myself alone in some glade or dell (it scarcely matters which) from which I’ll have a time extricating myself? Let’s not waste time worrying about needless necessities, though ...”

“... Bunker Day breaks and the night steams North, Its pitch-dark barges heading for Cape Rigor and the Land of Truth, Perfection’s speculative glare; The seas ice over and preserve Their endlessly refractive coast, An empty and eternal curve, Light packed against the polar frost. These August nights are nothing more Than souped-up evenings, sweat-soaked sheets, Or coming to on someone’s floor And morning’s featherweight retreats; And even when we die we live Hopped up in someone’s latest suit, Pumped full of sour preservative, Our grin set at the absolute, For several sticky nights at least Until we’re spaded in or burn And flames or worms or poltergeist Snap down the lid on our return ...”

“... Self-Portrait as Picture Window First day of snow, the low sun glinting on the gate post where a single Teviot ewe is licking frost-melt from the bars, the other sheep away in the lower field, the light on the crusted meadow grass that makes me think of unripe plums so local an event it seems, for one long breath, that time might stop; or, better, that it isn’t me at all who stands here, at this window, gazing out, not me who woke up late, when everyone had gone to work or school, but someone else, a man so like myself that nobody would spot the difference – same eyes, same mouth – but gifted with a knowledge I can scarcely register in words, unless I call it graceful and nomadic, some lost art of finding home in sheep trails, lines of flight, the feel of distance singing in the flesh, that happiness-as-forage, bedding in, declining, making sense of what it finds ...”

“... years of the Cold War. This curious fact is noted in David Monaghan’s monograph The Novels of John le Carré (1985). Smiley married his wife Ann towards the end of the World War Two. He was evidently then well into his thirties. In 1960, in A Murder of Quality, he was described as ‘the very prototype of an unsuccessful middle-aged bachelor in a ...”

“... it as ‘vomit’. Nevertheless, helped by a determined defence from its British publisher, John Calder (who claimed to discern in Burroughs the James Joyce of our day), Naked Lunch went on to become a terrific post-Chatterley best-seller. The Place of Dead Roads is published with a grant from the Arts Council: a double seal of Establishment approval ...”

“... by life in small groups and communities.’ In spite of the scepticism of their betters – John Locke thought that ‘a middle-aged plough-man’ could ‘scarce ever be brought to the carriage … of a gentleman, though his body be as well proportioned, and his joints as supple’ – it’s clear to anyone who’s read the words of the ‘lesser ...”

“... the very computer on which I’m typing these words, and could knock you up a copy of the Shorter John Cage, gratis, in a matter of minutes); but recorded CDs are still expensive. The expense is, from the point of view of the record companies, pure profit. So the cartel loves CDs – why wouldn’t they? The high price of CDs kept sales a lot lower than they ...”