“... resembling the darkling approach to the vampire’s castle in Nosferatu. The artist-filmmaker John Smith exhibits a short stick that his father used over several decades to stir paint; its end has been sawn off to reveal thirty or so concentric rings of dried paint, going all the way back to the grey-green of 1950s kitchen cabinets. This would be a ...”

“... will ‘improve cost efficiency’. Rocketship has certainly achieved that: its former CEO, John Danner, boasted of 25 per cent savings in staffing costs. There is one particular link worth noting between Ark Schools and these exciting developments in and around Silicon Valley. Ron Beller and Jennifer Moses, two former Goldman Sachs executives, have ...”

“... of bogus erudition – the Brexit white paper was, he said, ‘the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Philip II at Le Goulet in 1200’ – and he must have enjoyed expressing his hope that it would ‘not be necessary for Her Majesty’s stay at Sandringham to be interrupted by her in person having to prorogue Parliament’. Speaking the next ...”

“... to enter his enclosure, and slides around in his own darkness. Exactly 146 interviews later, John le Carré, our premier narrative spook-meister, exhibits, by his own admission, that knack whereby the memory fails and the lie takes over. There is something in his tone that advises us not to believe him too much. The interview took place in 1997, more ...”

“... like a recognisable modern garden appear in the record. The 19th-century horticulturalist John Claudius Loudon devotes much of his work to ‘fourth-rate’ gardens, by which he meant gardens of a size he thought small but we would consider reasonably large today. His love of the ‘gardenesque’ – a great variety of plants, planted as individual ...”

“... pubs where ‘no one’ wants to be distracted from drinking ‘by music or women’. We have John Boyd Orr describing how he propelled selected children – male, of course – from a poor school into scholarships: his achievement leads him to comment on the ‘many potential first-class leaders and scientists’ lost to the country in ‘the poorer ...”

“... natives and said vile things about the sainted Aneurin Bevan. Dornford Yates, in short, was John Buchan with big brass knobs on – an ultra-Imperialist and a granite diehard, who seduced the public with his flashy and worthless stories in much the same way as child-molesters tempt eight-year-olds with gaily-coloured sweets. But now comes A.J. Smithers ...”

“... he took hold of my ear. I stood in the corner near the insect case, remembering my bike. I had the John Bull Puncture Repair Kit in my pocket: glass paper, rubber solution, patches, chalk and grater, spare valves. I was ‘riding dead’ – freewheeling downhill with my arms folded and my eyes shut, looking Mr Ray in the eye. Every time I looked round he ...”

“... Coldstream’s time at the GPO Film Unit was coming to an end, but his association with John Grierson had a lasting effect. I cannot remember if I became aware of the doctrine at the pub or at the Group Theatre Film School where I first heard Coldstream teach with typically paradoxical practicality. Grierson held it to be naive as well as wicked to ...”

“... Canaletto of 1740s Westminster, renders a particular local streetscape with poignant acuity. Like John Akomfrah, the Ghanaian-born director of Handsworth Songs, the Venetian is reminding me what I take Britishness to look like. But their works come as oases in a fuzzy and overstretched survey, only flickeringly illumined by any emotional or formal ...”

“... of any Democrat partisans to Obama’s left. Hope somehow never dies. In 2008 Krugman supported John Edwards, then Hillary Clinton, and then fell in line behind Obama even though he saw his candidacy as a ‘cult of personality’. ‘There’s a trap I’ve seen some people fall into,’ he said in 2010, ‘you let your vision of what should be get ...”

“... postponed. ‘The people of Abyei are the ones who shot the first bullet for revolution,’ John Ajiang Kiir, a local administrator in Abyei, proudly told me. This isn’t true but the sentiment is accurate enough: Ngok Dinka leaders say their people fought, died and suffered for the South’s independence, and to be left behind now would be a terrible ...”

“... Syria has for now turned into the war that never happened thanks to the gaffe that never was. Once John Kerry let slip that there was something Assad could do to head off a military strike – agree to international oversight of his chemical arsenal – the stalled march to war became a headlong retreat. Obama appears to have found a way out of the hole he had dug for himself, with a helping hand from Putin ...”

“... challenged attacks on the tone of Sarah Palin’s campaign rallies made by the Georgia Congressman John Lewis (whose record in the civil rights movement obliged McCain to call him an ‘American hero’). Gently ignoring the question in his first answer, Obama responded, when McCain brought the subject up again, by pointing out that hecklers at Palin rallies ...”

“... think in the exhibition of architects’ drawings from the Barbara Pine collection, at Sir John Soane’s Museum until 27 August. The most interesting and liveliest are sketches which take you close to the moment of invention. These, like the material at Tate Modern, are early moves, unresolved and sometimes tentative. Frank Gehry’s 1982 ‘Study for ...”