“... spreadsheet jigsaw, mapping the stories from the Sartre biographies (Annie Cohen-Solal, John Gerassi, Ronald Hayman) over those from the Beauvoir biographies (Deirdre Bair – very much the best; Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, Margaret Crosland). Check those against the crucial four volumes of Beauvoir’s memoirs, those translated as The ...”

“... were a mistake. (Didn’t he have one kind friend who could have whispered something tactful?) As John Updike has put it in a very thoughtful fashion commentary on the whole unfortunate business: Ike, for instance, dear Ike with his infallible instincts, would never have let himself be caught in lace stockings, even though he did have the legs for them. I ...”

“... reason, comes the prison diary of an activist arrested in 1794 but not brought to trial, John Augustus Bonney. The second half of the book, which is concerned with some of the Lyrical Ballads, has little obvious common ground with the first half, still less with the diary, except for humanitarian sentiment, which was virtually inescapable. The trio ...”

“... and uncontrollable as the monarch once was. It cannot be relied upon – any more than King John – to be an adequate guardian of the citizens’ rights and interests. Whatever the force of these arguments, it still seems slightly unsettling to find a broad group of the Left backing proportional representation and a written Bill of Rights. Most of ...”

“... London jury for a libel in a Greek paper whose London circulation was a few hundred copies. Elton John got a million pounds from the Sun, which had suggested he’d had a relationship with a rent boy. The wife of the Yorkshire Ripper was awarded £600,000 for an article, published six years before she issued her writ, which suggested that she had taken money ...”

“... can he recognised even by those averse to its political perspectives. The effectiveness of John Eppel’s poems can also be recognised by readers who may feel uneasy about their political implications. They are very much engaged with history – the protracted death of white Rhodesia: A boozy hand of rebels, we fought the world and lost. Eppel does ...”

“... this also was not organised. There was soon a glut. An austere young business man from Cleveland, John D. Rockefeller, set out to capture the refining and extend the marketing in a strategy of what later came to be called ‘integration’. By the 1880s, his corporation. Standard Oil, controlled more than four-fifths of the American market. At the same ...”

“... Denis: ‘Marnie – wig, smell and all’; ‘Sam Smith, MP for Flint and religious bore’; ‘John Bulman, tutor, whisky lover and cheat’; ‘The misery of picnics’; ‘The Palship, dressed to kill ... ’ In triumphant contrast, there is: ‘Myself at 11, fisherman, child musicologist and budding atheist’. A Welsh Childhood is also strengthened by ...”

“... some successes in providing clues that helped identify such spies as the Admiralty clerk William John Vassall; Georges Paques, a French officer in Nato; and Hugh Hambleton, a Canadian professor. But although he insisted that there must be moles in the CIA, he never found one. Instead, over the years, his list of suspects in the West became more and more ...”

“... of a few able solicitors, all judges are drawn from the relatively small barristers’ profession. John Morison and Philip Leith, two Belfast academics, have had a brave go at penetrating and describing in sociological terms the business of advocacy in the United Kingdom – a country containing three separate jurisdictions and legal professions. The contrast ...”

“... Foucault, closely followed, as we shall see, by Presidents Reagan and Bush, Margaret Thatcher and John Major. The heroes are – well, Derrida, of course, but above all Noam Chomsky, here exalted especially because of his sturdily rationalist opposition to Foucault, in an exchange on Dutch Television in the early Seventies about the location of political ...”

“... very much on the minds of the authors of the new three-volume biography of D.H. Lawrence, of which John Worthen’s D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912 is the first instalment. The theory, as Worthen explains it, is that having three different people write the life will be ‘an explicit (even dramatic) acknowledgment that, however, important the ...”

“... up in Rochester, Upstate New York (coincidentally the birthplace of another sui generis writer, John Ashbery). Abandoning an early ambition to become a composer, he graduated from Haverford College, and then worked for a year on Wall Street. Attracted by ‘the prosperous-seeming world of books’, he had short stories and ‘quasi-philosophical ...”

“... painters to be Epstein’s advocates. His commercial success depended on a few patrons, above all John Quinn, who bought much of his early carving, and on the demand for portraiture from a group very much more nearly coterminous with the political establishment than his detractors were. Epstein found the attitudes of critics understandable: they were a ...”

“... this sickly interlude U and I was a return to form. The book explored Baker’s relationship with John Updike, as writerly model, father figure to be challenged, and occasional sharer of the same physical space (the two men’s passing encounters couldn’t be said to constitute even acquaintance). U and I reduced Updike’s work to a mulch of remembered ...”