“... it as hard as she does to distinguish motive from method.This approach yields an immediate result. John Ashbery once remarked that he had been sufficiently ‘grabbed and bothered’ by his first sight of Parmigianino’s enigmatic Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror to feel that he ought to ‘do something’ about it. Sensing a kindred spirit, Davis squares up ...”

“... the US government. It would take more than personal reassurances from the US secretary of state, John Kerry, to get them back. In addition, Levey, the former Treasury lawyer, played spoiler to these efforts. After leaving government, he worked on sanctions compliance as chief legal officer for HSBC, ensuring that the bank avoided another huge fine; in ...”

“... in October 1529, More, though a layman, was soon the Church’s most eager agent. With the help of John Stokesley, the Bishop of London, he broke into the houses of suspected heretics, arresting them on the spot and sometimes interrogating them in his own home. He imprisoned one man in the porter’s lodge of his house, and had him put in the stocks. He raided ...”

“... that of Lillian Ross, who in 1952 wrote Picture, an arresting, intimate account of the making of John Huston’s movie of The Red Badge of Courage.* But Joseph Mitchell was doing a similar thing; John Hersey used something of the method in writing Hiroshima, as did James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Since we’re ...”

“... with I.G. Farben and resisting participation in war production). United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis is more villainous than any businessman in No Ordinary Time, and although Doris Kearns Goodwin invokes Eleanor’s sympathy for the miners’ grievances, she treats the wartime mining strikes as Lewis’s personal vendetta against FDR. Brinkley ...”

“... but still dramatic falls have been taking place in other states of the former Soviet Union). John Lloyd intends no irony in his title, but his book covers a time when Russians have abandoned birth in a big way. A new Russia may be in the process of being born, but new Russians are not. Far more serious than the refusal to reproduce is the collapse in ...”

“... and Kant. The ‘History will absolve me’ speech quotes, among other more famous names, John of Salisbury and John Knox. But as Szulc remarks, ‘one sees how his methodical mind subordinates all texts to his private interpretation.’ Castro had, and still has, a large appetite for information, but he appears to ...”

“... than metre. The stakes are raised (though the game remains essentially the same) in ‘SDI’ by John Levett, where the briskly-handled iambic pentameter stiffens a pleasant holiday conceit and gives it seriousness and point:Ten miles above the tits at St TropezA satellite’s remote, panoptic eyeIs tracking us and quietly waiting forThe gesture that could ...”

“... In 1978, at a seminar on John Maynard Keynes held by the University of Kent, Raymond Williams talked about ‘The Significance of Bloomsbury as a Social and Cultural Group’. He accepted Leonard Woolf’s characterisation of Bloomsbury as consisting ‘of the upper levels of the professional middle class and county families, interpenetrated to a certain extent by the aristocracy’ with ‘an intricate tangle of ancient roots and tendrils stretching far and wide’ through those classes ...”

“... have taken a very different line, and in their chapter on the general law of medical negligence John Finch and Robert Cowley (respectively an academic and a practising lawyer) commend them for doing so. The Canadian Supreme Court has pointed out that what is a reasonable risk to a doctor is not always so to the patient, and that to allow medical judgment ...”

“... overdue attention. Lawrence’s enemies still deny his comedy, which was often self-deprecating. John Carey, who wants all writers to be nice (ideally, as decent as Arnold Bennett), wrote a book about the nastiness of various modern writers called The Intellectuals and the Masses. In it Lawrence is scolded for his ‘fascism’, his ecstasies of ...”

“... of new schools of literature has become a given, a plot point in a narrative as familiar as a John Grisham thriller or a Danielle Steel romance: somewhere, ‘out there’, a few writers are preparing the ‘next big thing’, and these writers will ‘unexpectedly emerge’, usually at a time when critics are bemoaning the lack of fresh talent on the ...”

“... weak introduction to his attack on the present Pope. Of course it is true, as O’Brien says, that John Paul II is an authoritarian and an obscurantist. (It could almost be said that these qualities come with the territory.) It is likewise the case that the Vatican and the Muslim extremists made common cause at the world population conference in Cairo. Yet ...”

“... some mail through the bedroom window, among it a Jiffy bag with a book in it from a Dublin friend, John, the nephew I recall of the Unionist doctor who found that bronze pin all those years ago. In the book, Trees of Ireland: Native and Naturalised, I read under Hazel: ‘Fruit, a true nut, egg-shaped, up to 2cm long, pale green becoming brown with woody ...”

“... of the dedicatory poem called ‘Zueignung’, which opens Faust: Part One, are translated by John Williams as What I possess now vanishes before me, And what was lost alone has substance for me. Was ich besitze, seh’ich wie im Weiten, Und was verschwand, wird mir zu                 Wirklichkeiten. The English lines are graceful and ...”