“... It is the fate​ of some artists,’ John Ashbery once remarked, ‘and perhaps the best ones, to pass from unacceptability to acceptance without an intervening period of appreciation.’ For a long time – more than forty years in fact – there seemed no danger that this fate would befall J.H. Prynne: take him or leave him, it didn’t seem possible that he’d ever be acceptable ...”

“... and how, may be difficult to determine. The Hetling trial made great play with this ambiguity. John Mortimer, for the defence, asked a collector who appeared as a prosecution witness, having bought several ‘Hetlings’, why he had bought them. Was it for investment and financial gain or simply because he thought they were beautiful? The collector replied ...”

“... a Cafetière as sister to the immured (but undefeated) heroines of Beckett’s late monologues. John Elderfield, curator of the Portraits show, thinks the first statement of the ‘as if they were apples’ cliché may have been Charles Morice’s in 1905. Morice was the translator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, so ‘loss of world’ was ...”

“... Life, invented by Milton Bradley in 1860, which was itself a reinvention of Elizabeth Newbery and John Wallis’s moralising New Game of Human Life from 1790. The 18th-century version had a snakes-and-ladders set-up: players were sent forward to maturity when they landed on virtues and back to childhood when they landed on vices. It was unplayably boring; the ...”

“... translations of both works: of the first by Sylvia Townsend Warner in 1958, of the second by John Sturrock in 1988. The English titles rather elegantly contradict one another. Sturrock’s is literal and exact: Against Sainte-Beuve. Townsend Warner’s is more allusive and less quarrelsome: By Way of Sainte-Beuve. Sturrock calls her title ...”

“... of – like life itself. I now realise that I was only able to capture something of the Reverend John Murgatroyd’s feelings, his ‘enthusiastic tenderness’, for his servant’s little bastard daughter in my book Master and Servant because that passage has been in my mind for fifty years. ‘Oh, the pea!’ I have said to myself countless ...”

“... of the term, slotting it between ‘guilty quotation marks’ throughout the issue. Designed by John Piper (with whom Myfanwy was living at Fawley Bottom, a rundown farmhouse in Oxfordshire), Axis was crisp and modern, with sans-serif lettering and experimental prose. But Myfanwy’s refusal to pin down abstraction infuriated the artists. In what Maclean ...”

“... and reward the interest of a mass readership. Direction, sometimes amounting to misdirection, is John Mullan’s topic. ‘As the title of this book suggests, Dickens’s artfulness is often an almost impudent trickery.’ To illustrate what he means by artfulness amounting to trickery, Mullan draws on a rather different scene in Oliver Twist, in which ...”

“... in the 1890s at Friedrich Wilhelm Universität in Berlin, and his short story ‘The Coming of John’ features an episode in which the protagonist is intoxicated by a performance of Lohengrin. This rapturous feeling is only shattered when a white childhood friend arrives and asks him to vacate his seat – an experience that Du Bois compared to the Veil ...”

“... a rhinestone dog-collar.’ He was responding to Auden’s admonition on reading O’Hara’s and John Ashbery’s entries for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1955: ‘I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any “surrealistic” style, namely of confusing authentic ...”

“... The 1949 meeting was held at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Woodward arranged for John Hope Franklin, a Black historian who had just published From Slavery to Freedom, a pioneering survey of African American history, to deliver a paper. But where would Franklin sleep and eat? Woodward facetiously suggested that Franklin bring along a ‘pup ...”

“... the Americans, in 1975 Whitlam was removed from office on flimsy grounds by the governor-general, John Kerr, and intelligence co-operation resumed. Kerbaj refrains from judgment on whether the CIA had a hand in the matter.In New Zealand, there was a more sustained challenge to the country’s position as a far-flung auxiliary in the US-led military and ...”

“... that put the issue back on the agenda in Wales. During his brief time as Labour leader, John Smith tasked Davies with drawing up plans for devolution in Wales. Smith was a true believer, unlike Tony Blair. But Blair inherited fully formed plans for devolution in Scotland and Wales when he became leader in 1994, and Smith’s commitment to hold ...”

“... attack’, and by preferring, of the various accounts of Christian given by the survivor John Adams on Pitcairn, the one which is unfavourable. Christian’s Pitcairn was, of course, no more a paradise than Bligh’s Bounty. There were Tahitian women on Pitcairn, but not enough of them, and the results were another, bloodier mutiny and Christian’s ...”

“... it with six thousand urns containing urine. Floating irresistibly back come recollections of John Nance Garner, Vice-President of the United States, describing his own job as ‘about as much use as a pitcher of warm piss’. John Nance Garner, where are you now that we need you? The bizarrerie that pleases me most is ...”