“... as a constant background hum over her three decades of public life, like the presence of ‘John Cale’s viola in the Velvet Underground song “All Tomorrow’s Parties”’. It’s a pleasure to imagine how baffled she would have been by that. But without losing sight of the absurdity, self-aggrandisement and malice in Whitehouse’s ...”

“... its traumatic aftermath, moving inch by inch towards the horror at the centre of the story. John Bartle – Bart – is an infantryman from Virginia serving in the Sunni triangle at the height of the Iraqi insurgency: ‘Al Tafar’ stands in for Tal Afar, where Powers was a machine-gunner with an engineering unit (‘Up north, near Syria. Like a hajji ...”

“... faces and momentous events is a familiar move in Boyd’s fiction. In The New Confessions (1987), John James Todd, a Scottish filmmaker, fights in the trenches, is pauperised by the Wall Street crash, witnesses the rise of Nazism in Berlin (where he attends parties with Fritz Lang and Thomas Mann), and arrives in Hollywood just in time to fall foul of ...”

“... stand over the flame when at rest, always terrifying it with his staff. In 1661, in Fumifugium, John Evelyn wrote that coal smoke had transformed London into ‘the suburbs of Hell’. Forty years later, Timothy Nourse noted that acid in the smoke was causing London’s oldest buildings to be ‘peel’d and fley’d as I may say to the very Bones by this ...”

“... commissions considered by the President and the Department of Defense,’ the Attorney General John Ashcroft has just declared in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, ‘is carefully drawn to target a narrow class of individuals – terrorists.’ Does he go on to define this narrow class? Don’t be silly. ‘Our legal powers are targeted at ...”

“... Dick Cheney were intent on attacking Iran with or without the approval of the US Congress.’ John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org predicts US strikes this summer, safely distant from the presidential election next year. Bush has already shown his disdain for the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, which advocated negotiations with Iran, and has ordered a ...”

“... sneaked in with a wispy ‘Song’ in August 1904, though he still included the editor of Dana, John Eglinton (W.K. Magee), in the rogues’ gallery of his broadside ‘The Holy Office’, published later the same month. The history of the British avant-garde can be traced in the fugitive magazines whose titles turn up litany-like in Iain Sinclair’s ...”

“... on each of these days 20,000 people were unable to receive their scheduled supply. According to John Ging, the director of UNRWA in Gaza, most of the people who get food aid are entirely dependent on it. On 18 December UNRWA suspended all food distribution for both emergency and regular programmes because of the blockade. The WFP has had similar ...”

“... Bronx. O’Brien is one of a long line of hicks from upstate who made their way to the big city. John Ashbery, whose work O’Brien disapproved of (‘the poetry of programmatic inconsequence’), had arrived in NYC 15 years earlier, from a farm near Lake Ontario. Many of O’Brien’s poems could be characterised as pastoral. This is ‘East Branch’: a ...”

“... the campaign and have now come in from the cold. These include Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, John Bolton and Sarah Palin. All of them are touted as potential cabinet appointees but all of them have enemies among the Republicans in the Senate who could block their bids for office and return them to permanent vacation as back-up commentators on Fox ...”

“... it sets itself at an ironic distance from fiction. In one scene, the embattled lawyer played by John Turturro hands a floor plan of the murder scene to an employee at a New York copy shop. ‘Is this for Law & Order?’ the shop assistant asks as he makes the duplicates. ‘I do a lot of props like this for them.’ ‘Yeah, yeah, Law and Order,’ Turturro ...”

“... challenged the award, with some success, before the US Supreme Court. One of its lawyers was John G. Roberts Jr., now the chief justice.) Another polluter, Bethlehem Steel, was dumping 18 kilograms of cyanide per day into the Chesapeake Bay. Thornton forced it to pay $1 million to charity. (Bethlehem’s illegal dumping had saved the company $36 ...”

“... from his time as a student at the Slade, where he studied under Henry Tonks, befriended Augustus John and was chucked out after a few months for poor attendance; they show him to be a talented and restrained draughtsman. Eight years later, having flirted with the idea of becoming a poet, he turned to primitivism: Anthony (1909) is a monolithic head on a ...”

“... in Hollywood; H.L. Mencken, who came under suspicion for his German background during both wars; John O’Hara, whose many failures included a job application to the fledgling CIA). The book’s editors, JPat Brown, B.C.D. Lipton and Michael Morisy, founded and run the website MuckRock, where anyone can file a Freedom of Information Act request with the US ...”

“... accessible only to those whose gender and class supposedly made them invulnerable to corruption. John Woodroffe (1865-1936) was typical of Britons with a penchant for Tantra: by day a judge on the Calcutta High Court, renowned for his severity, he was by night an ardent Tantrika, publishing translations and introductions under the pseudonym ‘Arthur ...”