“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... thighs and remarkably elastic anatomy, than among portraits or specimens of natural history (the John Dory, a monkey, a dromedary).Having established the distinction between Olympian poetry and quotidian prose, he obtained startling effects by allowing elements of one mode to cross into another: he gave his antique heroes the huge moustaches of contemporary ...”

“... to thunder – is a hot line to the person who created Bertha Mason. Yet a few feet away is Gwen John’s Girl in a Red Shawl, in creams and rusts, with no harsh lines but very exact hair, looking like a mural in the process of being uncovered. Without a linking narrative it is not easy to decide what might bring the paintings by ...”

“... made legs seem stumbling and stumpy, shortness there’. The madness, too, of her father, John Guthrie, whose eyes slip ‘up and down her dress’ when Chris is harassed by a local ‘daftie’ and ‘peep out’, like those of ‘a caged beast’, when he sees her in her knickers; who sneaks round the door of her room at night, ‘a great cat ...”