“... completed) drama of modern life called ‘Sweeney Agonistes’, as well as a translation of Saint-John Perse’s prose poem Anabase, which didn’t appear until 1930. ‘I thought my poetry was over after “the Hollow Men”,’ he acknowledged later. It was some years before he discovered that this wasn’t the case. Overwhelmingly, these letters give us ...”

“... of the stranger allies of the missing child’s mother is a self-appointed representative called John Calvin, the moving spirit behind the local Neighbourhood Watch. Borrowing for this character the name of a punitive theologian, who doled out self-satisfaction to the elect and despair to those destined to be damned, isn’t likely to be a novelist’s mark ...”

“... to fashion Bush’s thinking. Paul Wolfowitz is not mentioned; Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and John Bolton, the moustachioed Strangelove of the mid-Bush years, between them merit only seven references in the index. Three of these are to page 84, where Cha unexpectedly records at length the epithets applied to them by the North’s propaganda ...”

“... and Farm Aid, and Red Wedge, and Rock the Vote, and Live 8, Coldplay, U2, the late and the later John Lennon, and perhaps almost as many good causes as there are actors. It can only be a matter of time, surely, before Eminem turns, however briefly, to Christ and begins to walk in the way of righteousness, as Alice Cooper, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Roy ...”

“... globally – a big if – we will before long be able to trade carbon anywhere in the world. As John Lanchester noted in the last issue of the LRB, the science of global warming is not straightforward. The basic physics has been clear since the 19th century. What’s been harder to understand in detail are matters such as the many feedback loops by which a ...”

“... is closer to Henry James than to Genet.Snyder makes no reference to Purdy’s close contemporary John Horne Burns, whose 1947 novel, The Gallery, had negotiated a sure-footed path through the competing claims of directness and prudence (it became a bestseller). The gallery is the Galleria Umberto 1 in Naples, a monumental shopping arcade, at least ...”

“... to shield him from the charge of being a closet republican, or a classical republican like John Toland. He believes in a ‘legal limited monarchy’, and has a humane idea of consensus and national unity within such an arrangement. He is an active, adept pragmatist, a revolutionary moderate. In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe speaks of Crusoe’s ‘life of ...”

“... the monumental American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, the artist of choice would be John Singer Sargent, brilliant pictorial chronicler of the beau monde of the 19th century. Like Sargent, Hughes is a brilliant crowd-dazzler and populariser; like Sargent, he is unadventurous in his choice of precedents; like Sargent, a dashing but flattering ...”

“... There would be one more escape, in 1960. Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers, Clarence and John, got away – and not one body washed up anywhere. That’s the basis for the Don Siegel film, Escape from Alcatraz (1979), in which Clint Eastwood played Morris and the warden was the late Patrick McGoohan, so famous himself as ‘The Prisoner’. There was ...”

“... often waned as Comte’s doctrines were more fully understood (most famously in the case of John Stuart Mill, whose early admiration for Comte’s phenomenalism and rationality gradually gave way to revulsion at his dogmatism, religiosity, ‘moralism’ and hostility to personal liberty). Nevertheless, prominent 19th-century figures who acknowledged a ...”

“... with the feminist Christabel Marshall – who wrote under the name Christopher Marie St John – Edy designed and produced a huge number of suffragist and antiwar plays. Holroyd lists these achievements, but fails to suppress a light if persistent drumbeat of condescension. Edy was ‘a natural suffragist’ in that ‘she did not have to think very ...”

“... still policed its own members and more than a few were called to the bar for going too far. Sir John Coventry, whose story is told in Patterson’s dazzling prelude, might not have had his nose slit open, supposedly with the king’s approval, if he had been disciplined by his peers for casting aspersions on the king’s morals. The privacy of debate was ...”

“... Obama’s promise to withdraw ‘one to two’ combat brigades a month for 16 months. Suddenly, John McCain’s belief that US troops should stay until some undefined victory looked impractical and out of date. The Iraqi government seemed almost surprised by its own decisiveness. It is by no means as confident as it pretends to be that it can survive ...”

“... give content to his rhetoric and rescue him from himself – as well as from his mother. The good John Shorne, we are told, ‘was his father’s son; the bad John was the son of his mother.’ And so we come again to Lady Sackville. The description of her in Broderie anglaise is very close, in places identical, to ...”

“... about birds and had much to tell us on subjects ranging from the fossil avifauna of Britain to John Clare’s poetic bird tally. A naturalist and conservationist, he had previously written the most detailed biography imaginable of the fulmar; was one of the editors of the New Naturalist Library; and regularly appeared on the BBC. The Shell book covers ...”