“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”