“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with an archaic intensity – as if body, fabric and landscape were all one. Here is farmer John Radcliffe, a mass of creases and mud, stitched and darned repairs. His cat has crept into shot. When Killip brought Radcliffe a print of this photograph, he folded it carefully till it could vanish into his coat pocket.In 1975, Killip was awarded a two-year ...”

“... densely worked strokes against a nimbus of white paint, like scrawled writing on a piece of paper. John Ashbery described the way her ‘calligraphy, sometimes flowing, sometimes congealing, continues patiently, as though in a long letter to someone’. Mitchell was briefly married to Barney Rosset, who ran Grove Press, and she became almost a patron saint to ...”

“... The author of A Tenured Professor is not only a famous tenured professor of economics but, unlike many of the breed, an elegantly witty writer. From time to time he demonstrates his versatility by turning out a novel. This one is, in part anyway, an unimpassioned satire on the recently fashionable school of economic thought that deals in Rational Expectations ...”

“... Short Character has always seemed to me a brilliantly assured book, but it hasn’t enough detail. John Middleton Murry’s book is still vivid, but it’s a quirky performance, enamoured of a few lurid ideas. Irvin Ehrenpreis’s biography is assumed to be definitive, and I agree that the ascertainable facts are rigorously displayed. But it is an unexciting ...”

“... Cartier-Bresson which are turned to when photography is used as propaganda and shows public faces (John F. Kennedy, for example, or Anwar Sadat) in private places looking kind and nice. Avedon’s West pictures, with only one or two exceptions, show a person or a couple standing square on to the camera: they are full face, and sometimes show the hands, never ...”

“... English nobility in the later 14th century, if only because in the 15th century religion led Sir John Fastolf to beaueath most of his war booty to Magdalen College. With Braudel on ‘The Rejection of the Reformation in France’ we are getting on. As a parting thought, Braudel throws in the suggestion that the Reformation halted wherever it ran into the ...”

“... senior members of the service shown in the film – the now dead Control, nicely overplayed by John Hurt in flashback, had five suspects since he included Smiley – but that we are given no reason to care which one it is. It is part of the machinery of any thriller that the villain could be anyone; of the machinery of a good thriller that the villain ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... helpful, could be mistaken for an angel (if he weren’t Terence Stamp, fresh from playing Troy in John Schlesinger’s Far from the Madding Crowd). He understands everyone, leads them to discover their secret selves. He saves one character from suicide, turns another into an artist, and inspires another, a very rich man, to give his factory to his ...”

“... Visiting​ the sea for its own sake is a two-hundred-year-old idea, roughly speaking. John Nash finished his expansion of the Royal Pavilion in Brighton in 1822. A few years later, Boulogne, on the other side of the Channel, became an early beach resort: ‘You will find whatever you are looking for there,’ Manet wrote to a friend ...”