“... the Sierra Madre, and a friendly profile of its director in Life, led to an invitation to work for John Huston. He wrote an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s story ‘The Blue Hotel’, which Huston did not use but liked enough to give him another project, The African Queen. Later Agee collaborated with Charles Laughton on the screenplay of Davis Grubb’s ...”

“... of the City of London. In 1603, a quarter of a century after bricks began to be manufactured here, John Stow described its buildings as ‘filthy cottages’. Since then, the area, whether one calls it Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, Banglatown, has been a byword for poverty and violence. ‘A land of blood and beer,’ a rector of Hawksmoor’s ...”

“... one puffball for an evening weren’t going to change their day wear. So – fashion designers took huge losses, and department stores reeled, and some stores went out of business and some clothing operations in the US are still suffering from the results of the sulky determination of the late Eighties that fashion – and men – would dress women and ...”

“... touch to this minimalist makeover by chewing some gum then passing it on:Reluctantly Shuggie took the wad and put it in his mouth. It was slimy and warm, and it tasted of mint and beans and cigarettes. He found he didn’t mind; he rolled it slowly around his mouth and savoured it. He used his tongue to push the last of Keir’s spit up into the dry ...”

“... ever met McCorvey; ‘Jane Roe’ was just a common pseudonym for a woman in legal proceedings, as John Roe (sometimes Poe, Doe or Hoe) was for a man. Coffee would probably have continued to work on the case by herself if she hadn’t received a phone call from her old law school classmate Sarah Weddington. They weren’t friends, but Weddington had a question ...”

“... was the more active, but Berlin was to be no less eloquent. Reviewing his current collection, John Dunn has wondered whether Berlin was not always in some ways a deeply unpolitical person, only driven into politics by the threats of Nazism and Communism. The suggestion cannot survive a reading of his essay on Weizmann and the foundation of Israel, the ...”

“... of the term suddenly soared in the late 1990s, multiplying sixty times over and becoming, as John Gillingham, an economic historian attached to its earlier sense, remarked, ‘the current euphemism for overthrowing foreign governments’.Yet the relevance of its original meaning remains. Neoliberalism has not gone away. Its hallmarks are now ...”

“... pictures. He was also the dominant figure in putting on most of the exhibitions in which he took part after 1876: finding and renting the venues, rallying and organising the painters (no easy task), paying for the publicity, sending out the invitations, loaning pictures, doing the hanging and making purchases when, as usual, the public did not ...”

“... down with a case of ‘grippe-pneumonie’, with recurrent waves of high fever, from which she took two months to recover.Conditions were not alleviated at the end of the war, when a defeated Austria was left, in the words of Stefan Zweig, ‘a mutilated rump, bleeding from all arteries’. By then Freud, far from his earlier, exhilarated support for the ...”

“... Armenian breakaway from contested Nagorno-Karabakh) have their origins in ethnic rebellions that took place as the Soviet Union broke up. Almost all of them survive only because of Russian military protection against their vengeful neighbours.All have tiny populations, and some have less convincing claims to statehood than others. Abkhazia refused to become ...”

“... remarking that his ‘vocabulary and syntax are those of utmost abstention from waste’. John Updike referred to ‘the stirring purity’ of Kafka’s prose. Hannah Arendt, as well, wrote that his work ‘speaks the purest German prose of the century’. So although Kafka was certainly Czech, it seems that fact is superseded by his written ...”

“... on her lap. At a gathering of British psychoanalysts, students and academics organised by John Forrester in the 1980s the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche asked why there are no artistic representations of the erotic pleasure a mother gains in breastfeeding her child. Behind that question was another one. Why does the psychoanalytic representation ...”

“... Yet he, too, makes of the poet what the title of one of his book’s most appreciative reviews, John Carey’s, called ‘The Hollow Man’. Moreover this is not, in Ackroyd’s case, a mere technicality, an unfortunate function of the concept of biography as necessarily external. His Life firmly presents Eliot as characterised by an essential emptiness at ...”

“... special interests and ignorance. Hence, on the one hand, the adventures of people like North, John Poindexter, Dennis Ross, Howard Teicher and Michael Ledeen, and, on the other hand, the amazing pudeur of the Secretary of State, whose position on Irangate matters, according to the Tower Report, was one of complete detachment. Representative Tom Lantos of ...”

“... and the operations of imperial oil, inevitably stoked a strong nationalist reaction. By 1958, John Foster Dulles reluctantly acknowledged the limits of Big Oil geo-strategy, conceding that nationalism ‘made it more difficult for the oil companies to maintain a decent position’. Mosadeq in Iran, Abdul Karim Qasim in Iraq, Pérez Alfonso in Venezuela ...”