“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... obvious they’ve neither the form nor the substance only the theme – but what a theme it is – John Melly’s breezeblock bothie in the dunes above Dooey Strand a windy look-out post from the Emergency the Lone Man’s House at Ballyeriston (baled hay in every room blank uncurtained windows dust sealight burp of the fields doggy bones on the kitchen ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had passed as a subject ‘out of the orbit of landscape into that of Victorian genre’, as John Gage says in his book about Turner’s picture. The Railway Station shows a train about to leave Paddington; the detail of the architecture is correct – Frith had photographs taken for reference – but it is the partings and greetings you look at ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... which made the Little Review famous, the serialisation of Ulysses, pivots around the figure of John Quinn, antisemite and inspired collector, who sponsored Pound as the paper’s foreign editor and paid for contributions by Eliot, Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. Pound recognised the dangers of publishing Joyce: ‘It might be well to leave gaps,’ he advised ...”

“... only other member of the coven who had any English was a dwarf with gold teeth’). The producer, John Houseman, made up a past as a cowboy and Cambridge graduate. The critic who flattered the production’s reputation for jinxes by dropping dead after filing a disobliging review had been ill for ages; his main complaint was that the curtain went up late.The ...”

“... 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 ...”