“... o’clock in the morning. They’re wrong. I nearly died in an experimental-plane accident with John Denver. People would talk and forget everything they said. Several writers blabbed away entire books in the corner of Blacks. Out of the blue, in the Union, somebody asked her bullying husband for a divorce. Hurrah! Up in the Academy, Auberon Waugh, happy in ...”

“... landscape – and this is just one study. Around the time those tower blocks were going up, as John Pendlebury recounts, local preservationists and councillors in York teamed up to imaginatively restore and repopulate the historic precinct inside the city walls – an early example of a heritage-driven strategy that Newcastle and Liverpool would seize on a ...”

“... of understanding them to others. This posthumous collection of essays discusses lyric poems from John Donne to Ocean Vuong. Most of the pieces begin by quoting an entire poem, which is then set up against a big concept (William Cowper’s poem on the death of one of his pet hares is discussed under the aspect of ‘charm’), so you get the idea that reading ...”

“... through diet and frequent defecation. From his base at Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, John Harvey Kellogg, physician, dietary reformer, founder of the breakfast cereal empire and author of such tracts as ‘The Itinerary of a Breakfast’, proselytised against the debilitating consequences of ‘civilised’ diet, leisure and defecatory ...”

“... of nature which grow within a man marked for decline. Artists such as Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, John Piper and Graham Sutherland depart from his text, and while it is tempting to quote the manner of their going it is more illuminating to give a sample of the way in which he addresses himself to the much more difficult task of describing the nature of a ...”

“... surprises. More than once, we come across the scene from the end of Ford’s The Searchers, where John Wayne catches up with the girl who’s been stolen by the Indians. We think he’s going to kill her, because he hates the idea of contamination, however innocently incurred. He picks her up and everything changes. He carries her back towards home, all ...”

“... In 1919 she began to play an active part in Berlin Dada alongside Hausmann, George Grosz, John Heartfield and the rest. All of these artists shared her communist commitments, and all were making collage. But none demonstrated the command of mass cultural imagery Hoch developed so quickly, and none managed to work on a similarly ambitious scale. It was ...”

“... Expressionists, Herbert Huncke plus any given Beat, all of the New York School, Bob Dylan, Nico, John Cale, Lou Reed, Malcolm McLaren, Patti Smith and Mapplethorpe, William Eggleston, and … hang on, here’s Walker Evans. And there, not exactly flitting past, goes the bulky shadow of Henry James. Tippins has embarked on a compendious venture, as the index ...”

“... he (or we) can handle, and solves some of it in his own fashion. This fashion doesn’t please John Brolin as Bigfoot, the crony/tormentor cop, who wanted more arrests. Katherine Waterston is very persuasive as Doc’s returning old flame, a beach girl who has got herself involved in an elaborate scheme to take a rich man’s money from him; and Jena ...”

“... The places​ were Philadelphia and New York, the names were John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans and a few others, heirs to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, spoken of with awe in every version of the story. Something called West Coast jazz, thought by many to be an oxymoron, was making itself heard in the persons of Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Shelly Manne and Dave Brubeck ...”

“... if I had to do it all again          I wouldn’t.          John Berryman said that: I’m not saying it. And just as, when those two blokes came to replace the boiler, and asked would I like to pay cash and I said ‘Nee probs’ –          and watched them carry gear in from the obligatory once-white van ...”

“... is a set of philosophical meditations which belongs on the shelves next to, say, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. But Murray’s preface explains that ‘natives and some incomers habitually say “on” Bunyah rather than “at” or “in”.’These poems are mostly about the history of Bunyah, its inhabitants human and animal, and what it ...”

“... over the airwaves. It’s hard to decipher at first but is gradually revealed to be a recording of John Denver singing ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’. This is someone’s idea of a joke. Ridley Scott’s certainly, but also that of someone within the story. The song would have been 133 years old in 2104, so its appearance is proof either of classic status ...”

“... He also detected fluid in my right lung and swelling in my ankles. He referred me to the John Radcliffe Hospital’s ambulatory assessment unit the next day. For the time being, he said, I could forget flying home. After years of negative articles in the US media about overworked doctors, cursory exams and brusque support staff, I wasn’t expecting ...”

“... unmatched: the tallest giraffe ever recorded, a Masai bull, measured 19.3 feet. The explorer John Mandeville only mildly exaggerated when he wrote of the ‘gerfauntz’, in the first English-language account in 1356, that it had a neck ‘twenty cubytes long [about thirty feet] … he may loken over a gret high hous.’ (As Mandeville is himself a ...”