“... 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 ...”

“... manufacturer, E. Remington and Sons. And the Tommy gun, invented by a one-time Remington engineer, John Taliaferro Thompson, was known during prohibition as the ‘Chicago typewriter’. The emphasis on typewriting as rugged individualism (not so much Wershler-Henry’s as that of the tough guys he writes about) is presumably not unconnected to an anxiety that ...”

“... experience of terror’ to put the government’s case, such as the Glasgow ‘folk hero’ John Smeaton, who wrestled a burning suicide bomber to the ground (nobody got round to asking Smeaton if he had a view on the matter). But what’s really farcical about the situation isn’t that Davis is about to fight a one-man crusade against himself. The ...”

“... of the recordings take the form of interviews, and the presenters don’t make matters any easier; John Lehmann, for example, speaks to Aldous Huxley as if he were questioning him with a view to offering him something at the Foreign Office. Which just goes to show that broadcasting vices existed long before the days of Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross. None of ...”

“... It’s the dignity at Appomattox of Robert E. Lee Live from Phoenix on TV. That old white warrior John McCain gracefully concedes. Nobly gives the nation what it needs. A thousand years from now, you know it, This day will be remembered, poet. By the shores of Gitche Gumee, By the shining Big-Sea-Water, Told his message to the people, Told the purport of his ...”

“... ever since it was exhibited in 1971. Mel Gooding, in his monograph on Ayres, records the gallerist John Kasmin asking her: ‘What am I meant to do with them?’ ‘You’re a dealer: I’m a painter. I must get on with what I want to do.’ The tone of that is typical. One-foot-out-the-door-ness flavours the whole Ayres operation and has, despite Kasmin’s ...”