“... and an action-movie plot. Atwood has never written a novel from a male point of view before, and John Updike was among the reviewers who complained that the men in The Blind Assassin* were mysterious and unlovable. Rather, she is known for her chronicles of women’s victimisation and resistance, and her use of first-person narrative to explore female ...”

“... moment of ration books and travel restrictions, of the lust for food, and hymnings of garlic, and John Minton’s seductive, and faintly Post-Impressionist, illustrations to Elizabeth David. Brooke, after the war, heads for the Mediterranean as fast as he possibly can, but, being Brooke, he is already deeply nostalgic for his Army days there and strives to ...”

“... is harder to create, and more easily destroyed, than Mitchell seems to realise. The result is what John Updike called a ‘million dollar penny dreadful’, a work that is admirable only if you think that ambition and vitality trump every other literary ...”

“... early history of species ‘bagging’ in North America. Every ornithologist will know the name of John James Audubon, but there were many other impressive pioneers in recording life on the continent. I hadn’t realised the extent to which Thomas Jefferson, for example, engaged in speculation about the affinities of fossilised mammoth bones that had turned up ...”

“... the Russell-Coteses had collected, such as James Archer’s Henry Irving as Charles I (1873) and John Collier’s Lewis Waller as Monsieur Beaucaire (1903), were really very fine. I had also begun to feel defensive about genre painting, which seemed to be eminently respectable when executed by 17th-century Dutchmen but was otherwise bafflingly taboo. Was it ...”

“... a monopoly of printing. In 1588 the anti-episcopal Marprelate Tracts (one of whose authors, John Penry, was executed for publishing them) provoked a system of press licensing which survived in one form or another, though with diminishing effect, until the last decade of the 17th century. The first thing that should be said about the current controversy ...”

“... missionaries were major presences there. Burtt frequently stayed with missionaries and men such as John Norton-Griffiths, the contractor of the Benguela railway, who beat his African workers so readily that Burtt claimed he was ‘cordially hated by nearly all his men’, all 1700 of them. Another well-known Englishman in Benguela was famed for having floored ...”

“... over only as a desperate jauntiness because the mood isn’t light but elegiac and, thanks to John Scogin, the 15th-century jester who haunts the book, malicious. Barker seems to identify with Scogin’s sense of humour, which is everything she wants her novel to be – disruptive, chaotic, violent, gnomic but not funny. The suspicion is that Barker has a ...”

“... in a Bond film or is it an allusion to, say, the opening of For Your Eyes Only, in which Blofeld (John Hollis) traps Bond (Moore) in a remote-controlled helicopter until Bond takes control of it, scoops up Blofeld’s wheelchair with the chopper’s leg and dumps him down a chimney? (This was Bond at peak camp; before the big drop Blofeld begs: ‘We can do a ...”

“... and both echo principles shared with them by a third experimenter, the chemist and astronomer Sir John Herschel. It was Herschel who first used ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ to name the two distinct stages of photographic depiction, and Herschel whose investigations ultimately made it possible to capture the vagaries of light. In brief, what Herschel ...”

“... in the age of infinite technological intrusion? The movie’s writers (Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, John Logan) obviously want to side with tradition against the mindless modernisers but their heart’s not in it. Even M herself is aurally present on a wire while Bond is chasing through Istanbul on his bike and leaping onto a train. This is a fine ...”

“... so outraged by her pursuit of pleasure. The absolution and reverence that came to the novelist John McGahern from the penitent monsignors who used to persecute him has yet to be granted to Edna, though I expect it will come. It may not last till the millennium, but for the time being at least, the curse of the Catholic Church no longer carries as far as it ...”

“... Keith Ridgway used to be compared to John McGahern for his dourly lyrical stories of a changing Ireland. (‘Fr Devoy nodded his head and sipped his tea and waited. He watched the sky move and thought he saw rain in the distance but could not be sure.’) That stopped with the publication of his third novel, Animals, in 2006 ...”

“... in the work of several of the philosophers Putnam approves of (in particular Stanley Cavell and John McDowell). But the trouble with that strategy is that nothing ontological follows from the fact of entanglement. Apollo was much entangled with the forms of life in ancient Athens; but if there isn’t any Apollo, then there isn’t. It is not a defence of ...”

“... executing him; in Eileen, plot arrives in the form of a tall redheaded woman called Rebecca Saint John whose unexplained, shining presence Eileen recognises as ‘my ticket to a new life’. Rebecca – not all that different from Du Maurier’s Rebecca – has arrived from Harvard to set up an educational programme for the lost boys at the detention ...”