“... the use of the bomb, while the 31 August 1946 issue of the New Yorker had been entirely devoted to John Hersey’s unsparing account of what the nuclear attack had meant for civilians in Hiroshima. Stimson’s 7300-word testimonial – which was in fact written by McGeorge Bundy, later national security adviser to Kennedy and Johnson, with input and edits from ...”

“... who was also a fascist; next, as her stardom dawned, a Hollywood screenwriter; then an actor, John Loder, father of her two children; next, a nightclub owner; a Texas oilman; and finally her own divorce lawyer. She spent her last three decades alone. In Florida, where she died in 2000, her most ‘enduring’ friendship, according to Barton, was with a ...”

“... Sciences Research Council and a vocal critic of America’s war in Iraq. When Habib arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport in October 2006, border officials interrogated him at length, asking questions about an anti-war rally he had attended, and told him his visa had been cancelled. I was then an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union ...”

“... to deliver the Tanner Lectures, on which the book is based. Mise en abyme, anyone?). The son is John Bernard, who teaches at Appleton and is not pleased at the prospect of being reunited with his mother, a militant vegetarian. He tells her: ‘I haven’t had time to make sense of why you have become so intense about the animal business.’ On her ...”

“... ignorant, the most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman Catholics in Christendom,’ John Adams, the second American president, wrote in 1815. The notion that they could form a ‘confederation of free governments’, as the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda had proposed, was as ‘absurd as similar plans would be to establish ...”

“... Modernity has no monopoly over scepticism. Supernatural agency was hotly debated and critics freely dismissed magic as fraud and delusion. From the early Christian church came the bogus levitator Simon Magus, a cautionary tale that endured for hundreds of years. His name links him to the priesthood of ancient Persia (and the wise men at the Nativity) but ...”

“... who announced that they had administered appropriate medication, that the King had vomited freely, and that his copious evacuations were ‘bilious and brown’. Why not cut out the middlemen, one (radical, nasty) journalist said, and just bring in the royal chamberpot so we can all have a look? After the coup of August 1792 the family found themselves ...”

“... over for the last forty years of his life and failed to finish. When his literary executor John Callahan appended some of these jottings to the end of ‘Juneteenth’, the ‘novel’ he extracted from two thousand manuscript pages, he gave Ellison the last word: the final note reproaches the editor from beyond the grave, along with the readers ...”

“... if he was charged with representing as his real life what was an outright lie.May I quote John Updike? Asked about my Zuckerman books, he said to an interviewer: ‘Roth’s inventing what looks like a roman à clef but is not.’But if your books are misread, other than by John Updike, isn’t that more or less the ...”

“... diaries, which Tynan bequeathed on his deathbed to his daughter Tracy. They have been edited by John Lahr, the perfect choice for the task – indeed, an inescapable one. Lahr is Tynan’s true successor at the New Yorker, reviewing theatre for the magazine, as did Tynan, and, more important, filling his loafers as its premier celebrity profile writer, its ...”

“... out, these concerns are not new. In 1875, less than ten years after the movement was founded, Sir John Strachey, a senior British colonialist, asked his colleague John Palmer to infiltrate the madrasa at Deoband and to report back on what he found there. Having taken a look Palmer concluded: ‘there cannot be a better ...”

“... includes a dozen of them, mostly in their entirety.Interest in his life is sharpening. After John Stuart Roberts’s compact and readable single volume of 1999, we now have Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s double-header, with Max Egremont’s somewhat shorter Life expected soon. Sassoon’s story has also reached a wider audience through television re-creations ...”

“... defender of the Bosnian cause, or at least its dedicated mourner. He has written a polemic against John Major’s Government and David Owen, the EU mediator in the remains of Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995, for their connivance in the ferocious dismantling of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He is keen on Major’s New Labour successors, and confident that Tony Blair’s ...”

“... up and all the wrong way round?’ I think the answer is yes. Murdoch has used the Gawain poem freely as a source of motif and theme, as the broad inspiration for a ‘contemporary’ moral fairy-tale which need not obey the rules of realistic plotting. At any rate, the story of The Green Knight has a faintly dreamlike atmosphere, a magical imprecision to ...”

“... and Star Trek enthusiast called TCP ‘Germy’ Hinton on the Oxford leg, passing by the grave of John Dee, Elizabeth I’s court wizard, an allegorical theme-park called Milton Keynes and other centres of deep and magical significance, as they go. Why are they doing this? Because they have been sent on a quixotic chase after a texte de fétiche, a putative ...”