“... be prostitutes. He was a pimp, But in 1930, in his early forties, on meths, He heard the Reverend John Ridley at Burton Street Baptist Church, Darlinghurst, And scrapped his planned night in the down-and-out sanctuary. The piss-artist had his vocation revealed unto him – Writing Eternity. ‘I wish I could shout one word through the streets of ...”

“... of intelligence much easier. In April’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear activities, poor John Negroponte, the national intelligence director, was forced to say: ‘It’s conceivable that they are exaggerating their progress, but I don’t have any knowledge to confirm that.’ The letter, which Washington declared to be undeserving of a ...”

“... to make any claims that can be proved not to be true. It won’t do, for example, to assert that John Kennedy was shot by Jackie Kennedy, because it’s clear from the film footage of the assassination that he wasn’t. Of course, you could make a case for that footage being faked, but how then would you account for eyewitness reports? Best not to go ...”

“... of Jonathan Franzen and Ian McEwan. Wow. McEwan’s name has become something of a hallmark: even John Updike can’t have a novel published in London without its being stamped on the cover (‘“The finest novelist writing in English today” Ian McEwan’ it says at the top of the British edition of Terrorist, due in August from Hamish Hamilton). Obviously ...”

“... some of the academic establishment rejects such supposed nonsense, and what the archaeoastronomer John Michell characterised as the ‘vicious jealousy’ of the 1980s exclusion zone, is hard to account for. One real tradition that continues at Stonehenge is English radicalism, the campaign for land rights that comes down from the Diggers and the enclosure ...”

“... to relax. The closest thing we’ve had over here to Cheney’s peppering his buddy with lead is John Prescott’s lamping that farm worker who threw an egg at him in 2001. I know I’m not alone in thinking that Cheney’s cavalier way with a shotgun and disregard for the safety of his shooting companions pales in comparison to, say, his role in the war in ...”

“... month been reissued in English (Faber, £6.99), has a new rival. And I don’t mean Toby Litt, the John Calvin of the New Puritans, though the name of Jonson’s Zeal-of-the-land Busy also comes to mind, what with Litt’s latest 400-pager, deadkidsongs (Hamish Hamilton, £9.99) hitting the bookshops today, a mere 12 months after Corpsing came out. Litt, who ...”

“... and OK! magazine. Not that external regulation has worked either. Recent disclosures, including John Yates’s frank admission that his failure to reopen the hacking investigation in 2009 was ‘pretty crap’, suggest that police action against reporters’ malfeasance is as hopeless as the PCC’s. As Stewart Tendler, a Times crime reporter, put ...”

“... out of this alive. No one was celebrating noise Until the great homosexual American composer John Cage Discovered the great American sound of road rage, But with no automobile involvement, and lots of silence. It’s the roar of a subway car Filled with silent New Yorkers silently snapping their fingers To the beat coming out of an earbud in one ear, And ...”

“... of its own. ‘Inspiration contained a death threat,’ Saul Bellow said in his introduction to John Berryman’s novel Recovery. ‘He would, as he wrote the things he had waited and prayed for, fall apart. Drink was a stabiliser. It somewhat reduced the fatal intensity.’ But Bellow was a wizard of urban reality who never understood the reality of drink ...”

“... loved Heller’s Catch-22, thought it the very best novel of its time. He also thought highly of John Hawkes, whose Lime Twig was important to him. He thought Hawkes as a stylist was unsurpassed. And of course Nabokov, who’d taught him at Cornell. He was interested in what David Shetzline was writing, and said that one day he would find his way back to ...”

“... Acts. Although confrontational, there was nothing unprecedented in the Lords’ vote and, as John Bercow, the Speaker of the Commons, has stated, no procedural impropriety. If the clamour were confined to Tory MPs it could easily be dismissed. But a gaggle of retired law lords, who now see themselves as constitutional guardians, also registered concern ...”

“... how things should look breaks down. Maverick architects then indulge in all kinds of impropriety. John Nash’s excursions into an exotic vernacular with his Oriental pavilion at Brighton was to the received style of late 18th-century architecture what Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao was to minimal white-box museum design. Innovative buildings are ...”

“... Boss is doing more than merely refusing Republicans: he’s gone so far as to offer his support to John Kerry. Other ageing rockers joining him on the Vote for Change tour of battleground states include R.E.M., James Taylor and Jackson Browne, with the Dixie Chicks – whose lead singer, Natalie Maines, got into trouble for saying that they were ashamed of ...”

“... The seraphine, according to the OED, is an ‘instrument of the reed kind’ invented by a Mr John Green in 1833. It is, or was, a kind of harmonium, sometimes called an American organ and, according to the Dictionary, common in ‘Boer houses of the better class’. In Tasmanian houses, too, one is willing to bet. Indeed Fitzgerald, defying the ...”