“... Macdonald’s advice to publish under a pseudonym. His admission drew much attention, and caused John Crowe Ransom to retract his acceptance of one of Duncan’s poems for the Kenyon Review. The essay was also notable for its earnest protest against the ‘cult of homosexual superiority’, a volley probably directed at the Surrealist Charles Henri ...”

“... tell me.26 January. We are comfortably ensconced in our Weekend First seats at King’s Cross when John Bercow comes along the platform. Not quite the elegant, slightly flamboyant figure one sees in the Commons, he’s in a scruffy suede jacket and, according to the trolley attendant, sitting in standard class, where he is happy to have a conversation about ...”

“... pace and tension steady. That is what she set out to do when she was invited by the film director John Huston to come out to Hollywood in the summer of 1950 to write about his adaptation of Stephen Crane’s novel The Red Badge of Courage. She just stuck with the project from beginning to end. If you know how to report in a certain way, by seeing people and ...”

“... democracy, one of the supporting pillars of the postwar order in Europe. Perhaps that is what Pope John Paul II was getting at in 2000 when he combined the beatification of Pope Pius IX with that of Pope John XXIII, convenor of the Second Vatican Council and hero of the ...”

“... published in Colombo in 1900, Sinclair briskly sketches a career that had some parallels with John Clare (an elective Scot when the humour took him). Born in 1832, there was a mean village upbringing; a book-hungry lad leaving school at 12 years of age and commencing his education, ‘such as it was and is’. Sinclair describes a farming family of ...”

“... the process. It also reflects the strikingly ‘novelistic’ character of many of their lives. John Barrell has observed acutely (in the LRB of 2 November 2000) that so-called literary biography seems now to have become markedly less ‘literary’, subordinating or virtually ignoring the work of the writer concerned, except insofar as it can be made to ...”

“... Picasso the more. One of the great undocumented exchanges – perhaps we shall learn more when John Richardson reaches the war years – came when Picasso spent a week in 1944 trying to persuade Braque to join the Communist Party. Braque denied him, as he also denied a second approach from none other than Simone Signoret (I feel a three-hander play coming ...”

“... pupils, who included Aldous Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Peter Fleming, John Bayley – a literary macédoine to which several other ingredients could be added. As it fell out, I had myself no dealings with Lyttelton at school, knowing him only by sight. He had the air of being young for his age, a tall, apparently genial beak, well ...”

“... than Picasso the Charlatan. But the curious fact is that when Michael Ayrton in the Fifties or John Berger in the Sixties tried to react to the generally unctuous tone of what passed for Picasso criticism, they produced essays which rebounded more on themselves than on Picasso, though these are among the finest writers on art of the past half-century. The ...”

“... Her topic makes most sense when the details of diplomacy are placed in a wider context.In 1836, John Stuart Mill claimed in an essay that Lord Melbourne’s government had become ‘smitten with the epidemic disease of Russophobia’, an irrational panic that had triggered an unnecessary increase in defence spending. ‘Russophobia’ has never quite left ...”

“... had experienced group sex at Sandstone, the quasi-intentional community founded by John and Barbara Williamson in Topanga Canyon, California. Up to twenty people lived there, hosting regular parties on Wednesday and Saturday nights at which attendees (mainly couples, who paid to be members of the club) could have sex with whomever they ...”

“... councillors) who were unhappy with the decisions that had been made on the budget – the mayor, John Biggs, was seen by the left as a Blairite stooge. Sympathetic insiders passed on intel. People from the campaign turned up at Biggs’s weekly surgery, introducing Expand Not Extinguish and demanding that the council consult with them. Biggs agreed, on ...”

“... display the arc of a ball’s flight from the moment it’s struck to its distant landing. Golf, John Updike wrote, is of all games ‘the most mystical, the least earthbound, the one wherein the wall between us and the supernatural is rubbed thinnest’. I’m not sure about that. To witness (or in the unlikely event execute) a decisive action in pretty ...”

“... of the Washington Post, but it never occurred to him that he could actually close the paper. John F. Kennedy took a different tack, mugging up on things that individual journalists might like to be praised about. He understood writers’ egos, and major hacks visiting the White House would be greeted by JFK as if they were just the adviser the country ...”