“... The chief pleasure of the new version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is the sight of John Travolta as the model bad guy. He is genial and livid by turns, entirely persuasive in both moods, the very image of crazed behaviour, and far more engaging and unhinged than he was in Pulp Fiction. That film brought certain of his earlier roles to mind, but this one makes us want to rethink Grease entirely, and maybe the whole genre of the musical ...”

“... Group each took home more than $6 million in 2008; the founder of the University of Phoenix, John Sperling, is a billionaire. By the time students realise that they’ve made a terrible mistake, there is often no way for them to back out and no one to help on the other end of the phone; there’s nothing for it but to press ahead and try to recoup some ...”

“... and Bogarde’s? It’s not a full answer, there would be much more to say – about the John Dankworth score, for example, and about Robin Maugham’s novel. But it does suggest – all right, offer hints and signals – that there is a gothic ground where too much, too little and too subtle happily go together. In fact, you couldn’t do this bit ...”

“... who had once been part of that drinking culture but had gone sober. One was Campbell. Another was John Reid, who gave up drink in 1994 after having acquired a reputation as a serious boozer. McBride effectively finished Reid’s political career in 2007 when he fed poison about Reid’s past to the papers. But why did Brown tolerate it? Even McBride seems ...”

“... and painters of modern life that manifested itself most memorably in 19th-century Paris. So are John Sloan’s etchings of New York tenements and city crowds (he, too, had worked for newspapers) and George Bellows’s lithographs of a prize fight, a psychiatric ward and couples in the park. In London and Paris, the illustrations that painters admired ...”

“... An early one, the National Gallery Baptism of Christ, is dominated by just such naked figures – John and Christ. They are not shown, however, in a corner of classical Tuscany but set against a scene of North European forest and mountains – a landscape like a stage backdrop. The backdrop shares none of the light which descends through a ring of dancing ...”

“... for John Minihan Nous nous aimerons tous et nos enfants riront De la légende noire où pleure un solitaire. Paul Eluard The sort of snailmail that can take a week but suits my method, pre-informatique, I write this from the St Louis, rm 14 – or type it, rather, on the old machine, a portable, that I take when I migrate in ‘the run-up to Christmas ...”

“... the London pictures, paintings from 1618 through to the late 1620s, include religious subjects (St John on Patmos, The Immaculate Conception) and genre pieces (The Water-Seller of Seville, Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary). The genre pictures are lit, it seems, by an afternoon sunlight which penetrates dark rooms, strikes highlights ...”

“... which looked for a while as if it would be carried overwhelmingly. It was sponsored by Senator John Briggs, creepily played by Denis O’Hare, and was intended to ban gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools. It said that any teacher ‘advocating, imposing, encouraging or promoting’ homosexual activity could be fired. Quite a large mandate, and ...”

“... a coffee and took a flight to South Bend without leaving O’Hare.’ In South Bend he was met by John Matthias, poet, anthologist of the splendid and hugely influential 23 Modern British Poets (1971), published in Chicago, and professor at Notre Dame University. Shortly after Fisher arrived in South Bend, as Matthias remembered in an essay, they drove ...”

“... who you are taken to be? When and how do you assert or hide who you are? Stallworth, played by John David Washington complete with 1970s Afro, infiltrates the Klan on the telephone and with his name; a white colleague using the name does the actual hanging out with the bad guys. So ‘black’ here means imagined to be black, and the word in context needs ...”

“... the largest accumulation of stone blocks in Europe. Its architect, Joseph Poelaert, inspired by John Martin’s scenes of apocalyptic ruin, had been fantasising about such a structure for years before he won the commission to design the new Palais in 1861. Time passed, costs swelled from four million to fifty million francs, Poelaert died in 1879 and four ...”

“... I stopped listening to the Today programme several years ago when I noticed I had shouted at John Humphrys five times before breakfast, for several weeks in a row. (Humphrys in May 2003, told by his boss to read out Alastair Campbell’s insistence that the dodgy dossier wasn’t sexed up: ‘I can’t read this rubbish!’ That’s my Today ...”

“... at St Mark’s Church, collaborating with Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley and others. John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara were their guiding lights. A new American poetics was taking shape: daily and referential, tough and casual. Between 1967 and 1969 Mayer edited, with Vito Acconci, the experimental mimeographed magazine 0 to 9, which combined work ...”

“... The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (2015), which was published with blurbs from Elton John, Noam Chomsky, Piers Morgan and Stephen Fry, not exactly a ready-made support group. It has a chapter on Anslinger and Holiday. Hari suggests that the kind of argument I have quoted from the file was an aside – though it sounds to me rather more like an ...”