“... Bench spokesmen, there is some kind of scrutiny of government performance – as, for example, John Prescott has recently shown in transport, and Robin Cook in health. When both Front Benches are agreed on central issues, meaningful debate is difficult, bordering on the unachievable. Worse still, it may be difficult to get a debate at all. It was a ...”

“... perfectly squared, without the least winding or washboarding – flat as a sheet of plate glass. John Hersey, The Walnut Door three four knock at the door – imagine the door as subject no mystery just a coathanger a formal object on which for some reason you’ve to drape its own history – how it began – is began better than started? – began as the ...”

“... of that too: ‘Dario and I opened at the Persian Room of the Plaza on 10 June 1935. The next day, John McClain telephoned ... Pepi had just killed herself by jumping out of a window of the psychiatric section of the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. Looking in the mirror as I checked my hair, make-up and costume for the dinner show, I thought, her ...”

“... no one spoke to Alison at all and ‘any who made approach to me were dexterously diverted.’ At John Hayward’s it was made clear that she must not say anything to T. S. Eliot. Nor did her lover protect her. He refused to introduce her to friends, saying on one occasion: ‘One doesn’t introduce a child.’ When Beryl was abroad, he allowed her to spend ...”

“... by the rival needs of literature and politics has long been familiar to modern editors. John Dunn writes about it elsewhere in this issue of the London Review of Books. The present New Statesman has dealt with it by seeming never to have heard of it. It is a problem which, in certain of its relations, may be thought to have been new to the world ...”

“... is the single modest line on the copyright page, where no one looks, crediting the translation to John W. Schwieter. Schwieter also appears in the brief list of Further Reading, as the editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Bilingual Processing (2015). He is, as some of us would say, vom Fach.The Bilingual Brain is the product of equal parts personality and ...”

“... rule, tens of thousands more have been disclosed to the Undercover Policing Inquiry chaired by Sir John Mitting. The inquiry was ordered in 2015 by Theresa May, then home secretary, after it was revealed that the police had spied on the family and friends of Stephen Lawrence, who was murdered in Eltham in South-East London in 1993 in a racist attack by a gang ...”

“... what she is.’ Sartre, wearing a suit on the beach at Copacabana, looks dreary beside her. John Updike in his dull dad jumper feels like a token inclusion, Hunter S. Thompson naturally stands out. His Hawaiian shirts and safari suits became so recognisable that Gary Trudeau turned him into the demonic Uncle Duke of Doonsbury, much to Thompson’s ...”

“... scarcity of material.’ In a section somewhat dutifully titled ‘Defying Convention’, we find John Singer Sargent’s 1881 portrait of an austerely boyish Vernon Lee, and Alvaro Guevara’s Dame Edith Sitwell from 1916. Laura Knight, three years earlier, had been condemned by the Telegraph for a self-portrait with a nude model that lacked ‘the higher ...”

“... Clint Eastwood, a classy, stylised cartoon of a western hero, is half a samurai in a way that John Wayne is clearly not, and Leone uses music (in his case Ennio Morricone’s music) in very much the way Kurosawa does – to signal a mythological aura, the feeling of a tale often told. ‘Gunslingers are not samurai,’ Kurosawa said, and of course he is ...”

“... services are at high risk of failure by 2020. The report echoed the call made in 1828 by John Soane for ‘revision and speedy amendment’ to the old Palace of Westminster. He asked where a fire would be arrested. Six years later he was answered, as the great conflagration raged unchecked. Following the 2012 report, an independent consortium of ...”

“... that fills the whole universe and the human soul’. By the 1950s, he had come to the attention of John Bennett, a British fossil fuel researcher and follower of the mystic George Gurdjieff. Bennett invited Subuh to Britain in 1957, and he returned to Jakarta with a coterie of new European and Australian disciples. In 1966 the movement set up a very ...”

“... might now have the regal expansiveness of Paris if the Whitehall Palace that Inigo Jones and John Webb drew up for Charles I had been built. Then our prime minister might be living not in the modest decency of Downing Street but in something more like the Hôtel Matignon. Passing it and other grand houses given over to government use in the rue de ...”

“... 5 per cent, sufficient for fuel but not for weapons, as suggested by the Liberal Democrat peer John Roper. That would probably be acceptable to Iran, which has said all along that what it wants is its own enrichment capability within the framework of the NPT. This proposal does, however, rely on the safeguards system, and would require that IAEA inspectors ...”

“... are said by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen in his letter about Freud in this issue of the LRB, and by John Lanchester in his piece about Martin Amis. The note about Bartlett (who is identified as the ‘author’ of the book and owns the copyright) seems intended merely to spread a murky film over the question of whether or not this is really the work of Eva ...”