“... farms’ are. Well, some people do; but they like to keep it secret. According to John Hennessy and David Patterson’s Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (2002), in 2000 Google had 11,000 machines at four sites, two in Silicon Valley and two in Virginia. One thing that’s certain is that the farms are growing all the time, as new ...”

“... as winning the Cold War, or the ‘war on terror’. One of the things that’s so good about John le Carré’s Cold War thrillers is their moral murkiness, as they explore what happens when the people playing the game lose sight of its ultimate purpose, as they all inevitably do, and begin to play for the game’s own sake. Le Carré’s overripe ...”

“... agreeable pictures: recent purchases include a very neat, pretty oil painting of the shop of John Young and Sons, fishmongers, by the 19th-century Swiss artist Jacques-Laurent Agasse (the Queen owns his best-known picture, which is of a giraffe) and Compulsory Obsolescence, a meticulous drawing by Michael Landy in which he has copied line by line, letter ...”

“... that he might show signs of having been influenced by the Fugitives; indeed, the shades of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate seem to hover around many of the earlier poems in this volume, poems with titles like ‘Ladies by Their Windows’, ‘Landscape with Little Figures’, ‘Beyond the Hunting Woods’, ‘On the Death of Friends in ...”

“... like Eileen Gray’s lacquer and silver-leaf ‘pirogue’ daybed, and some practical, like John R. Morgan’s Waterwitch outboard motor. The details which make it possible to put these, not to mention any number of smart frocks, showy cigarette cases, smoothly engraved glass vases and bits of geometric architectural decoration, under the one heading ...”

“... which includes the dress with its black calyx-like bodice out of which white shoulders flower in John Singer Sargent’s portrait Madame X: a dress as famous as the Versace, and more scandalous. The anxiety/hope that a woman may fall out of her frock goes back further still. In Aurora Leigh, ‘that bilious Grimwald’ (a critic) observes the villainous Lady ...”

“... was now, as Gaston Tissandier put it in his History and Handbook of Photography of 1879 (quoted in John Falconer’s admirable and informative introduction to the catalogue), safe from the danger of being ‘modified and disfigured by an untrustworthy pencil’. Moreover the task of recording the monuments of India, which seemed doomed to defeat by the sheer ...”

“... by an unreality which can seem pernicious. A Constable sketch hanging nearby, and even Edward John Gregory’s jolly picture of boating on the Thames, Sargent’s picture of a boy by a river and Munnings’s Friesian Bull, all of which say more about the look of things and less about dream worlds, are not so embarrassing.Lever’s collecting was not ...”

“... San Suu Kyi; it might have been more interesting to denounce any or all of these. The title echoes John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, but that book did include some men by no means universally admired: George Norris, who attacked the Wilson administration’s infringement of neutrality during the Great War, or Robert Taft, who criticised the Nuremberg ...”

“... in a wholesale way only once. It was dressed in stucco when new, under the general direction of John Nash. It formed the central portion of his grand north-south route from Regent’s Park to Carlton House (demolished in 1827, only a year after the building work in Regent Street was complete). The Victorians made inroads on Nash’s scheme; the Quadrant ...”

“... consciousness to her 17th-century work without violating its historical dimension. I’m sure John Broadbent spotted this very rare quality in her when he invited her to edit parts of the Cambridge Milton in the early 1970s. I can remember the intense, tortuous, day-long arguments – inevitably in the kitchen, but this time our Norwich kitchen in St ...”

“... holidaying or not holidaying – ‘not holidaying’ has been the thrill of a lifetime for John Reid – and endorsed by Clinton. All this makes it easy to refuse calls for an inquiry, just as it was after 7 July. The joke is wearing thin. Blair’s second running gag has been to portray himself as a man with profound convictions about the need for ...”

“... for a minute or two. Who is responsible? Are the bloke and the body connected? Is either of them John Bayley? Rimington is an interesting figure and an amusing journalist. She knows a good bit about spooks obviously, and a good bit about spook fiction. She can’t bear 007: Bond ‘has about as much to do with the intelligence profession as Billy Bunter has ...”

“... for class insecurity. This underdog cockiness persisted for decades, serving as the driver of John Travolta’s sidewalk strut in 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, where disco prince Tony Manero eventually tires of Bay Ridge Brooklyn and his mooky friends as the magic spires of Manhattan beckon. A product of the jukebox era, Podhoretz belonged to an older ...”

“... very soon, I lose the markers by which I have navigated, the beacons by which I know myself. Like John Clare leaving the tight circle of experience around the village of Helpston (then in Northamptonshire), I step out of my knowledge, to the tottering edge of an abyss known as ‘the future’ or ‘the human contract’. Mortality. Of place and ...”