“... in which these cultural chronologies are combined in the work of Yeats and Joyce, George Moore and John Synge, and even, in a curious manipulation, Wilde and Shaw. Yet, although this reading is brilliantly executed by Eagleton, an alternative view is possible. Almost all critiques of colonial literatures are predicated on the notion that they suffer from a ...”

“... Boers’ spy in the town, reporting to the ‘Irish Brigade’ in the Boer Army which was led by John MacBride (the husband of Maud Gonne; I assume Kiernan is the novelist’s creation). Kiernan has two feisty daughters, Bella and Jane, who supply the romantic subplots very efficiently. Bella will ingeniously escape the siege with her Portuguese hairdresser ...”

“... fictions dependent on that end. He is keenly pro-life, and quotes, ultimately with approval, what John Cage said in response to a complaint that there was too much suffering in the world – namely, that on the contrary there was just the right amount. This is theodicy with God left out, or replaced by Nature. The argument here is that Darwin and Freud so ...”

“... turns. At first it seems as if it is going to be a biographical account of the trickster figure of John Laroche, one of the thieves in question. Laroche is an obsessive collector, having been through passionate affairs with turtles, fossils and tropical fish before committing himself to orchids – at least for some of the time Orlean knew him. It is at a ...”

“... the skills she had developed in earlier work on coal. Subsequently, the director of the unit, John Randall, decided to hand over to her the project that Maurice Wilkins, aided by Raymond Gosling, a doctoral student, had begun – the structural analysis of DNA. Wilkins learned of this only when he returned from overseas to find that his project had been ...”

“... split personality’: ‘The Japanese and American parts of me were now blended into one.’ John Okada’s novel No-No Boy, published in 1957, is bleaker; its title refers to a loyalty oath exacted from Japanese-Americans, which contains two key questions about their willingness to serve in the American Army and renunciation of allegiance to the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... jobbing historians like Pausanias, a gossipy travel writer who was a bit like an antique John Aubrey. She has done an admirable job in tracking down so many obscure references and easily persuades us that these early writers indeed recorded a palaeontological bonanza centuries before the first dinosaur remains were recognised by modern science. Mayor ...”

“... Saturdays, so as to catch the kiddies before bedtime, or clubtime, or drugtime, or whatever, but John Birt’s non-sporting apparatchiks kept on shoving the show further and further towards midnight. And Des was cross, too, about the BBC’s failure to secure the rights to various big games – internationals, FA cup ties, European Champions League fixtures ...”

“... The word ‘pantheist’ was not minted for another forty years (by the philosophical conspirator John Toland), but it fits Spinoza perfectly: as far as he was concerned, God suffuses everything, and individual selfhood is just a passing illusion which will succumb in due course to its own contradictions. The true terminus of our endeavours is the melting ...”

“... and replacing the nationalist agenda with the world view of the European New Left (think of John Lennon)’. Their targets included Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, who were criticised for peopling their work with neurotic characters; leading artists, for following cosmopolitan fashion; educationalists, for the decline in the teaching of the Bible, the Talmud ...”

“... and Expressionism; in the readymade and in Dada’s exploitation of industrial raw materials (John Heartfield’s political photomontages would have been impossible without collage); and even Abstract Expressionism (as Clement Greenberg argued, the little pockets of ‘depth’ that pucker the surfaces of Cubist paintings presage the hills and crannies in ...”

“... argue that the protections furnished by the US constitution do not apply to Guantanamo Bay. Even John Gibbons, who argued the case on behalf of Rasul, had to admit that the legal status of Guantanamo is ‘unique’. While other naval bases have had to bring their legal position into line with the laws of the host nation, the US military has exclusive ...”

“... shambles of construction. We think we know what Burnham was overheard saying when his partner John Root died, because it was written down (later) by Root’s sister-in-law, the poet Harriet Monroe: ‘I have worked, I have schemed and dreamed to make us the greatest architects in the world – I have made him see it and kept him at it – and now he dies ...”

“... Robb, I feel sure, quite misunderstands a letter written on 22 February 1884 by Henry James to John Addington Symonds, apropos of an article of his own about Italy which he had sent to Symonds. James writes: I sent it to you because it was a constructive way of expressing the goodwill I felt for you in consequence of what you have written about the land ...”