“... Now this is finally a category that makes sense to me. No wonder her titles so often remind me of John Ashbery’s. (He said that music was an even greater influence on him than visual art.) Williams’s titles are invitational or introductory, not explanatory: ‘Head of a Naked Girl’; ‘What a Great Man Learned about Reflection and ...”

“... the ‘deeper thinkers’ of the 1870s, carrying forward the social conscience of Dickens, while John Everett Millais, no less than his French homonym, possessed a manner affectingly and ‘personally intimate’.In chasing the works that Van Gogh looked at in London, the Tate exhibition takes us on some journeys in taste. It is easy enough to be stirred by ...”

“... But when the villain is a version of Orwell’s Big Brother represented by a large-screen image of John Hurt impersonating Ian McKellen impersonating Hitler, and when the good guy sees himself as a reincarnation of a Catholic conspirator from four hundred years back, you have to think there is some distance between actuality and whatever is going on in this ...”

“... With the arguable exception of John J. Pershing, whose over-inflated reputation derives entirely from his brief tenure commanding US forces on the Western Front, General Leonard Wood was America’s most prominent military officer during the first quarter of the 20th century. More than any of his contemporaries, military or civilian, Wood embodied the first American empire, inaugurated by the outward thrust of 1898, reaching its zenith in 1917 with US intervention in the Great War, and then petering out in the disappointing aftermath of that struggle ...”

“... future performance. Not that this administration was equally in the dark. During the 1980s, both John Roberts and Samuel Alito were bright young recruits to the Reagan Justice Department’s efforts to reverse the liberal jurisprudence of the Supreme Court; and their membership of the right-wing Federalist Society gave the neo-conservative establishment ...”

“... draft because it didn’t have to: that task was carried out by the JIC, under the chairmanship of John Scarlett, reporting to David Omand in the Cabinet Office, with some prior guidance from the Downing Street communications specialists, who gave him presentational advice he was happy to receive. He was, in every sense, up for it. 29 ...”

“... their movies in parking lots or off of trucks until they are chased away by the police. The critic John Anderson who has written a book about Sundance calls it ‘a progressive event that recognises the right of every American to get her or his movie on-screen.’ And yet, as Andy Klein, another journalist, complains, Sundance is ‘about as useful’ for ...”

“... and was already a good way in by 2012, when the ‘restored’ Penguin edition by Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon came out, with more than 9000 corrections. How much of a difference this will make to readers in China isn’t obvious: the linguistic complexity of the work is probably lost for ever in Chinese. As far as I know, Dai hasn’t said anything about ...”

“... Edgar Hoover, Castro, Khrushchev, Howard Hunt, Earl Warren, George H.W. Bush, Duong Van Minh, the John Birch Society, the Freemasons or Aristotle Onassis. ‘I am not a conspiracy theorist,’ he begins. ‘I am a conspiracy empiricist.’ He wants to know the truth because without it ‘another president could once more be cut down in his or her ...”

“... that is. He knows what every character in a Charlie Kaufman movie knows, whether it’s Being John Malkovich, Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He knows that reality puts up scarcely any resistance to fear or fantasy, and that inside every head is a cast of thousands ready to misrepresent the owner. This is essentially a comic idea ...”

“... But writing was more lucrative than the provincial stage. In 1860, when she was 25, she met John Maxwell, an Irish entrepreneur who published some of her short stories in one of his many magazines, and he successfully marketed her first novel, Three Times Dead, by giving it a new title, The Trail of the Serpent. Their subsequent affair was shadowed by ...”

“... that we might all be trooping across a canvas by Fernando Botero.’ They’re in need of ‘Big John’ toilet seats, ‘800-pound-rated shower chairs, and “LuvSeats” for couples of size to have sex’. Pandora Halfdanarson, who wants to lose ‘at least 20 pounds’, is unable to recognise her brother, Edison, when she picks him up at the airport, so ...”

“... without homage to J.A. Baker, or Gilbert White, or stern collectors like the 18th-century surgeon John Hunter, who dissected everything, including any hapless whale that wandered into the Thames. Much is fresh, though. When we reach New Zealand, the discussion turns to the relationship between the Maori and whales. And the Moa, the giant, now ...”

“... country,’ Abbott said on the campaign trail, ‘and we determine who comes here.’ The echo of John Howard in 2001, refusing entry to a freighter full of rescued boat people, is unmistakable: ‘we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.’ It’s an assertion that regularly does the rounds, despite the Refugee ...”

“... I face More of the epic would be discovered under the sand as time went on. In 1990 Stephanie Dalley added more lines to her edition from newly recovered pieces, but most of what’s left has probably been smashed in the course of the Iraq wars. It seems proper that a place of fire and dust, its skin scarred by warfare, should be the origin of the story of the Flood today: devastation in negative, flood and drought bound together ...”