“... how this ‘Moriarty of the book world’ met his match in a duo of intrepid young book dealers, John Carter and Graham Pollard, whose investigation is ‘worthy of fiction’. The ‘impossibly debonaire’ Carter, with his immaculately pressed Savile Row suits, could easily be a real-life counterpart of Dorothy L. Sayers’s fictional sleuth Lord Peter ...”

“... was a scapegoat against that fear. Montaigne’s essay ‘Of Pedantisme’, as translated by John Florio (who, gloriously enough, has sometimes been thought of as the origin of Shakespeare’s Holofernes), is partly a meditation on what Montaigne himself was up to when he wrote discursively impractical essays. Why should he be spinning out those fine ...”

“... a negative condition into a positive possibility. ‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it,’ John Cage wrote in 1949; two decades later Nauman said, in effect, ‘I have nothing to do and I am doing it.’ Although this formulation isn’t as dire as ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on,’ Nauman does share with Samuel Beckett (another early influence) a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... so he can make changes easily. He finishes the painting off in oil. Many realist painters, like John Sloan and the Ashcan School, render architecture in a more or less gestural fashion. But Estes is fascinated by architectural form and the way it can be used to frame interiors and the reflections contained within those interiors. In his work the edges of ...”

“... kinds, often several times a week. Cryptome isn’t entirely faceless: it’s run by a man called John Young, a Vietnam-era radical and a practising architect in New York, now in his eighties. But he’s a cantankerous repeller of journalists and keeps himself to himself. And the website – plain red links on a white page – is the model of the way a ...”

“... would be legal. Antonin Scalia articulates the doctrine in the movie, and there is mention of John Yoo, a clever lawyer who thought war crimes were a thing of the past and could smuggle anything, including torture and boundless invasion of privacy, onto the right side of the law. The 2008 election prevented a lot of this from happening. If the Republicans ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 justification for this survey of a single year is made in a nod to Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson, who described 1931-32 as his annus mirabilis. It was a hugely productive year, in part because of the new work Picasso was creating for the retrospective, in part, it’s claimed, because of his relationship with the 22-year-old Marie-Thérèse ...”

“... That would confirm the bitch plot. Still, we’re not going to find out. It’s good to learn that John Huston was one of the screenwriters, adapting a play by Owen Davis. Two other great if overwrought films allow us to see a little more of the range as well as the consistency of what the Davis character is up to. They are Now, Voyager (1942) and Dark ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... has a long tradition in Britain. Thomas Grant, in his book about the Old Bailey, Court Number One (John Murray, £10.99), gives special credit to Rebecca West, who wrote about treason and spy cases from the 1940s to the 1960s, and Sybille Bedford, whose account of the trial of Dr Bodkin Adams in 1957 is ‘generally regarded as the finest single volume account ...”