“... that Cannadine edits operate perforce at a much more basic level, and find it hard to take wing. John Davies’s essay on the Marquises of Bute and their dealings with Cardiff provides the vertebrae for a history of that city. The Bute initiative of the 1830s in equipping the coal export trade of South Wales with its infrastructure, mainly docks, was ...”

“... in logic and mathematics became known to the British mathematician Max Newman, and to the great John von Neumann in Princeton. He already speculated simultaneously on the foundations of mathematics, in Hilbert’s and Gödel’s sense, and on the conceivable capacities and limits of computing machines, and this combination of interests was his genius. He ...”

“... perhaps, figured in the great American Armory show of 1913, probably at the instance of John Quinn, the New York lawyer to whose patronage the Yeats family, as well as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, owed so much. Yeats mistrusted ‘the New’, although he knew well enough what was going on; and after what seems to have been a quite serious nervous ...”

“... is Richard Nixon, an embodiment of all that is best in the American character. By contrast, John Kennedy was a spoiled rich kid without principles or convictions, who thought he was above the law and ran around with glamorous women. Why, then, was Nixon’s Presidency a failure? The blame, Johnson contends, lies not with Nixon and the lies he told but ...”

“... like Knifegrinder and DJ Cormorant; Chef Macbeth with his remote-controlled planes; and sinister John Brotherhood, the focus for a series of portentous references to the Devil, and for stories of sexual depravity involving Siamese twins. Brotherhood says things like ‘Nails travelling at 300 m.p.h. can make quite a decoration on a child’s ...”

“... American realism, once a belief, is now an idle liberty. Writers such as Robert Stone, Joan Didion, John Irving and even Don DeLillo, are praised for their ‘realism’, for the solidity of their plots, the patience of their characterisation, the capillary spread of their social portraits, the leverage of their political insight ...”

“... loved. If one had to pick a mathematical genius at the furthest pole from Erdös, it might well be John Forbes Nash, 1994 Nobel Laureate in Economics, the subject of Sylvia Nasar’s biography. Where Erdös was impish, kind, open to all and monkishly pure, Nash was overbearing, secretive and abrasive, with a stormy marriage, an illegitimate son and several ...”

“... answer!’ Pastor Stephen Mitchell was proclaiming ‘the glorious gospel’ at John White’s Church on Sunday morning. Pastor Mitchell, who is in his early thirties, spoke of the ‘gross indecency’ of Chaldee in Abraham’s day. ‘Is this not a picture of our own province?’ he asked. ‘God is still calling out Abrahams. He called ...”

“... and authority of his prose.If Raymond Carver ranks among the great American short-story writers, John Barth is a master of the out-sized Post-Modern novel. They belong at opposite poles of the American literary spectrum. In ‘On Writing’, Carver mentions an essay by Barth in which the latter regrets the lack of interest his students express in ‘formal ...”

“... Simon Darcourt: he is a priest, a bachelor, and a professor of Greek in the College of St John and the Holy Ghost (familiarly known as ‘Spook’); he is also a man of acute observation and humane understanding. In addition, since much of the action of all the novels derives from Francis Cornish’s life and accomplishments, Darcourt provides a sort ...”

“... mischievous matchmakers, innocent fun, uileann pipes, sea-wind in the hair. Even if you swap John Ford’s Ireland for something more urban and contemporary, say that of Roddy Doyle, in which a good night out is more likely to involve soul music and a ‘ride’, it is still possible to find yourself idealising: Ford and Doyle (pre-Paddy Clarke and ...”

“... represent this contribution. Boy George and Marilyn are deemed worthy of over twenty pages. Elton John is represented by an account of the rent-boy allegations made in the Sun, Derek Jarman is dragged in to reminisce about swinging in San Francisco and NYC, and out of all the British bands to make their mark in the last four years (the Stereo ...”

“... by which every drop of blood and every smidgen of originality was extracted from a script. Now John H. Richardson, a writer for Premiere magazine, has updated the Kael concept. When Richardson writes that ‘the only big-canvas film-maker of stature we have today is Oliver Stone,’ he meant it to sting. His essay is full of good lines. (A Hollywood ...”

“... save his Chelsea friends from heroin addiction and himself from taking his chances in West Beirut; John Chadwick, who leaves the City to pay for the running-costs of his wife’s damp and dilapidated house in Italy with dodgy investments and asset sales, in Davy Chadwick; Richard Verey in Slide, after spells in the Foreign Service and on Wall ...”

“... boasted about their powerful contacts in the Tory Party and the Government. Greer even mentioned John Major as ‘a close friend’. The programme-makers arranged further such meetings, one in a Spanish castle, to which Greer was asked to invite his contacts. Greer’s network of helpful politicians was about to be exposed when Central Television and its new ...”