“... devotees to complain that Americans have got him all wrong. As early as 1897, the radical John Jay Chapman presented him as a fellow iconoclast who had been miscast as an apologist for American selfishness, ‘embalmed in amber by the very forces he braved’. The tendency of biographers to make their own Emersons means that some academics dislike the ...”

“... some of the women believed it must be a power thing. A few knew him as Peter, others as Craig or John. One woman had him in her phone as Blue Van Man. Shown ranks of photographs by detectives, however, the women all pointed to the same man. His name was Iain Packer. He knew Emma, they told the police. He’d had sex with her regularly, at least once by ...”

“... ideas can achieve influence and credibility by circumventing the world of academia altogether.John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke is a study of a moment in American history that isn’t usually considered a crisis: the early 1990s, when the United States was reimagining and repositioning itself in a post-Cold War world. Pop sociology and snap history have ...”

“... happen and in his new essay is pleased to record that it has. Some of this work is extremely good. John Roemer’s formal reformulation of the idea of exploitation, for example; or Jon Elster’s assessment of the extent to which Marx’s models of rationality match his own; or G. A. Cohen’s schematic reconstruction of Karl Marx’s Theory of History, for ...”

“... Walker Evans, James M. Cain, Nunnally Johnson, S.J. Perelman, Dawn Powell, Joseph Mitchell and John O’Hara. Many of these celebrated figures, artists and authors approaching fifty at the start of the decade or only lately past it, grew up in small provincial towns, emigrated to New York in the Jazz Age and worked together in the city rooms of the Herald ...”

“... of a fine new biography, Gabriele D’Annunzio: Defiant Archangel. Perhaps immodestly, its author, John Woodhouse, who teaches Italian at Oxford, says in his Preface: ‘This is the first fully documented biography of Gabriele D’Annunzio in any language, and, within the limits of reason, given the bizarre nature of D’Annunzio’s career, the first ...”

“... National Security Adviser), but also supplied the President with what National Security Adviser John Poindexter called ‘plausible deniability’ by insulating him from the men like North who were actually implementing his covert operations. Split from one another and from Reagan himself, North and Regan were the doubles of the President they served. ‘I ...”

“... isn’t like Rochester. If Rochester in the ‘Allusion’, and Shadwell in The Medal of John Bayes (1682), accused Dryden of clumsy attempts to ape the rakish idiom, some of the written specimens weren’t in the least clumsy. This couldn’t be said of the play’s dedication to Rochester, however – a document of such laboured oiliness and such ...”

“... his homosexuality. His autobiography is not coy about his attraction to men. His biographer, John McCormick, concludes that he was homosexual, but for sound social and personal reasons unwilling to risk what was in his day at best a precarious preference. To that repression, McCormick attributes the distant tone of Santayana’s writing, especially his ...”

“... parents as customers before 1998 (for every household that signs, the school receives £7.50). John Battle, Labour’s energy spokesman, told me that electricity and gas packages can now be bought from mailorder catalogues. The preservation of monopoly elements in both generation and supply has encouraged the febrile profit-making which we associate with ...”

“... memorialist or seanchaidh, whose stories were edited into a book by the great Gaelic scholar John Lorne Campbell. Her words had gone on buzzing and irking in a corner of my brain. Most sources are agreed that the people left Pabbay and the last two islands in the chain, Mingulay and Berneray, quite freely, in a final despair at the harshness of the ...”

“... came from what might be called indirect patronage, such as the sale of proofs and manuscripts to John Quinn, the New York lawyer and patron whose interest had been sparked by Pound. Even the advances and royalties that Joyce received from the Egoist and its book-publishing wing were not the result of profits: Weaver subsidised both operations, and when she ...”

“... many of these powerful stories justify the comparisons made by his admirers: most pertinently, to John Cheever and Raymond Carver (Yates falls somewhere in between). But when Yates’s stories are encountered en masse – this new edition brings together his two collections and nine previously uncollected pieces – the uniformity of experience described ...”

“... to another, which can become a fairly gentle way of describing your own personal history, too. John Smith, the late Labour leader, believed a devolved Scottish parliament was ‘the settled will of the Scottish people’. He died too young and is buried now on the Isle of Iona, in what is thought to have been the graveyard of the Scottish kings. There’s ...”

“... cheer to the rafters each time Germany scored a goal. 8 June. Spot the typo, spare the blush. John Vincent writes from the University of Bristol: ‘In your memorable diaries you quote Disraeli’s view of May 1881, a month after his death. Would that other historians had access to such primary sources!’ 14 June. Alan Bennett’s letter to the LRB about ...”