“... hearing it spoken with his un-English, un-American accent, and reinvented as an estrangement. John Updike is a self-confessed fan, but Joyce Carol Oates, who is not, has also conducted a wonderfully ingenious argument with Nabokov in several novels including The Childwold in 1976 and her Chappaquiddick novella, Black Water, in 1992, where the question of ...”

“... gruel to give it a bit of flavour (dukes were in terrific form at this period). One cartoon showed John Bull presenting a shovel and a basket of bread to a starving Irish family saying: ‘Here are a few things to go on with, and I’ll soon put you in a way to earn your own living.’ (How many wags in prandial conclave did it take to think up that one?) An ...”

“... Small, Good Thing’. I think that they did a good job too. KB: A few weeks ago I saw the film of John Cheever’s ‘The Swimmer’. RC: Isn’t that just a wonderful film? I saw it when it first came out, and I talked to John Cheever about it. We were teaching together in Iowa. He claimed he just took the money and never ...”

“... romance.’ Elizabeth Gaskell in Mary Barton draws a similar lesson from the dangerous career of John Barton, Chartist and trade-unionist. Uneducated, lacking wisdom and judgment, his one clear feeling was hatred to the one class and keen sympathy with the other ... The actions of the uneducated seem to me typified in those of Frankenstein, that monster of ...”

“... victims, who kept on being willing no matter how they were treated. Miller cites the case of John McMaster, at one time ‘first Pope of the Church of Scientology’, who later fell into disfavour. McMaster, he says, now speaks of Hubbard with enormous bitterness, always calling him ‘Fatty’. When Hubbard had him thrown overboard one day (only in ...”

“... Bloomsbury homosexuality. A year later came Lawrence’s abortive effort at blutbrüderschaft with John Middleton Murry. In the summer of 1918 Lawrence probably consummated his infatuation with the Cornish farmer, William Hocking; then, just as he was putting the finishing touches on Women in Love, came his involvement with the failing marriage of Godwin and ...”

“... arrogant display of budget that speaks of royal visitations, the finish of the London Marathon, or John Major on walkabout, prospecting for inner-city blight. But on this unearned, mint morning, the fuss is all about real royalty, indigenous royalty: one of our local princes of darkness, a cashmere colonel, is about to be boxed. A mob of expectant necrophiles ...”

“... Despite obvious exceptions – memoirs by John Stuart Mill and R.G. Collingwood, confessions by St Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau – autobiography is not a genre that comes naturally to most philosophers. The typical modern philosopher – the Kant of the three critiques, say, or the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus – seeks perfection in the composition of systematic treatises and closely-argued works of logic, not in the harvesting of personal memories, which (if one is honest) are inherently uncertain, often contradictory, and usually tinged with emotion ...”

“... community. On arriving in New York, Phebe and Mary went to live with the Broadway tobacconist John Anderson, doing domestic work in exchange for their board. Later, Mary went to work in Anderson’s shop. It was here that she began to be called ‘The Beautiful Cigar Girl’ and became a well-known figure to men involved in the marketing of words and ...”

“... her willed vertigo. At the end of the novel, the narrator recalls a conference ‘sponsored by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, at which eight members of the Kennedy Administration gathered at an old resort hotel in the Florida Keys to reassess the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis’. In its own, individual paragraph she gives us the following ...”

“... The last years of Fuller’s life saw an extraordinary outpouring of poems. His son, the poet John Fuller, aware of the great quantity already published in his father’s declining years, was surprised to find a posthumous mass of additional typescripts. Last Poems,* selected by John Fuller from this cache, includes an ...”

“... big event (and even the Serie A game between Roma and Inter postponed to the following day). Pope John Paul II is to celebrate a televised mass in St Peter’s, and then travel down to San Giovanni Rotondo to celebrate Mass there. The millions of pellegrini in attendance are to be transported by more than five thousand coaches (100 from Poland alone) and 19 ...”

“... are far enough advanced to canonise ‘science fiction by Kilgore Trout ... The poetry of John Shade ... The one and only Don Quixote by the immortal Pierre Menard.’ It’s a bit reminiscent of the hybrid Russian-American world Nabokov invented for Ada. Here, John Kennedy wasn’t shot in Dallas but years ...”

“... characters flew, fully-costumed, from the platen), so we late-born could catch up. In 1980, at John Lennon’s slaying, my entire high school was in mourning for ‘our hero’; similarly, my old resentment of Spider-Man was swamped beneath a surge of proprietary feeling when I first heard, maybe two years ago, that ‘my Spidey’ was finally getting his ...”

“... National Insurance ‘virtually bypassed local government’ from its commencement in 1911, John Davis remarks in his chapter on central government and the towns. In this way, equity jilted devolution. Central expenditure on social services rose more than fourfold between 1918 and 1921 – a rise made possible by the ‘more buoyant central tax ...”