“... 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 ...”

“... of a ‘new world-epoch’, but the death of an old one: Natty is in his seventies, and Indian John, as Chingachgook is called by the residents of Templeton, a frontier settlement based on the Cooperstown of the novelist’s childhood, is a sad shadow of the Mohican warrior he once was, especially in the Christmas tavern scene in which he partakes a little ...”

“... during the 1970s, when holidays brought together the Heaneys, the Hammonds, Deane, Brian Friel and John Hume; there is a book to be written about those summers and their consequences, in politics and in the arts.But Heaney’s debts to music pre-date Hammond, and extend far beyond his example. A blind musician, Rosie Keenan (remembered in the poem ‘At the ...”

“... early modern equivalent of the yellow highlighter. According to the Jacobean educational writer John Brinsley, ‘the choycest books of most great learned men, and the notablest students’ were marked through, ‘with little lines under or above’ or ‘by some prickes, or whatsoever letter or mark may best help to call the knowledge of the thing to ...”

“... of Fehling’s thesis of Herodotus the literary liar is widely detectable in recent work. John Marincola makes an intriguing case for Herodotus sometimes imitating the tall-story-telling of Odysseus, and expecting his audience, familiar since childhood with the Odyssey, to know when he was doing it. But this is to project on the past the sophisticated ...”

“... Leone’s long, long close-up of Eastwood’s or Fonda’s impassive face; the Warhol movie of John Giorno sleeping for five hours and 20 minutes; Jarman’s 79-minute single shot of saturated blue.Or I could do nothing. I could sit in sadistic silence waiting for whatever is next on his list of diagnostic appointment moves for all ...”

“... and ‘broadcast power around the entire planet’. In the spring of 1899 he secured $100,000 from John Jacob Astor IV (later the richest man to drown on the Titanic) for the development of a new lighting system. Disregarding Astor’s expressed intentions, Tesla spent it on moving his entire wireless-power operation to the mountain resort of Colorado ...”

“... has to be presented, and indeed published in Latin. In an attempt to keep the tradition alive, John Paul II encouraged communities to put forward candidates for sanctification. The 482 new saints announced during his long pontificate amounted to almost a quarter of all those canonised in the previous five hundred years. At present some three thousand cases ...”

“... had the social and intellectual distinctionof some famous Brigadiers from elsewhere: Julian Bell, John Cornford or André Malraux. But their motives for fighting were large – larger than Spain. As one old volunteer told Hochschild, ‘For us it wasn’t Franco … it was always Hitler.’ Before the populations of the democracies woke up to what was at ...”