“... from the University of Otago he went to Cambridge and did a PhD on the Jacobean dramatist John Ford. Michael doesn’t have a New Zealand accent, but a neutral international one. He is an actor, has a fine voice, and if he quotes poetry he does it well. His brother is the movie actor Sam Neill, and their voices and accents are almost ...”

“... poets discussed by Bridget Keegan – Ann Yearsley, Mary Robinson, Henry Headley and later John Clare – were all of one mind about this. Chatterton, they thought, had died by his own hand in poverty and despair, neglected by the metropolitan world. Michael Suarez’s account here shows that Chatterton’s relations with the book trade after he ...”

“... Neither prize-winner, under the new regime, has been a crowd-displeaser, nor a crowd-puzzler. John Carey, a serious man except when he is writing literary journalism, chaired this year’s jury, and announced that he was in favour of ‘widening what might be looked on as the Booker’s scope’. He and his judges had, he thought, a preference for ...”

“... characters, even to moralise – although he makes the remark when a composite figure called ‘John’ complains that the author is exploiting other people’s experiences: ‘I am owed.’ ‘You’re not . . . You’re like a . . . a cannibal or something.’ And owed, perhaps, as the book too often seems to assume, a sympathetic attitude to his ...”

“... most strongly. He first took it in London, a city he hated, having come from Tangier to consult John Yerbury Dent, an addiction specialist who was the main proponent of the apomorphine cure. Dent saw drug use as a means of combating the crippling effects of anxiety, and believed that addiction was a disease and the addict should not attract moral ...”

“... story. It happened that Vidal had information on this subject: both Stephen Spender and John Lehmann had been told by Hugh Walpole – in identical words, apparently – of an occasion mentioned by Edel. Walpole, then young, beautiful, and awed by the Master, had offered himself to James. After a moment of hesitation, James shuddered and ...”

“... agreement with Hamas. On this occasion, in a sharp departure from precedent, US Secretary of State John Kerry explicitly blamed Israel for the breakdown in talks. His special envoy, Martin Indyk, a career Israel lobbyist, blamed Israel’s insatiable appetite for Palestinian land and continued expansion of the settlements, and handed in his resignation. The ...”

“... appeared in a Westminster court for a pre-extradition hearing, there was the odd spectacle of John Pilger and Ken Loach outside pledging surety for Assange’s bail, along with Jemima Khan, the daughter of the late tycoon and anarcho-capitalist James Goldsmith, whose contributions to British public life included repeated libel actions against Private ...”

“... Continental Drift, Bob Dubois dies of stab wounds on a Miami side street. That novel won the 1985 John Dos Passos Prize and was nominated for the Pulitzer. The road not taken isn’t pretty, but there’s a lot of mileage in it. ‘This is not Bambi territory,’ a lawyer says in The Sweet Hereafter, the story of a small town convulsed when a school bus ...”

“... the reign of Charles I would have been his favoured archbishop, William Laud? What justice did the John Hothams, father and son, get for defying their king when he attempted to claim his magazine of arms and munitions at Hull? They were subsequently executed by order of Parliament. How could the oracles of the common law reconcile the principle of inviolable ...”

“... all, and she escapes as the tyrant is overwhelmed by his own mutinous verbiage. Earlier this year John Mullan wrote an article proposing that the essential difference between ‘literary fiction’ and ‘genre fiction’ is that only ‘literary’ novels ‘ask us to attend to the manner of their telling’. The implication is that genre fiction with ...”

“... Strikes in Glasgow, some notable acts of sedition, a riot in the town centre and the careers of John Maclean, James Maxton and the Red Clydesiders, ‘not one of the radicals of that era is represented among the statues of George Square.’ The riot caused the army to scramble its tanks (the only such time on mainland Britain) and to position snipers on the ...”

“... like Ralph Nader, Michael DeBakey, William Peter Blatty, Senator James Abourezk and General John Abizaid rarely visited Lebanon itself. As attached as some were to their grandmothers’ cooking and to bits of folklore, they preferred to keep the country at a distance. Anthony Shadid was an exception. As he wrote in this account of his struggle to ...”

“... were excitedly vulnerable to the charms of fame and what came with it, and the men – who, as John Peel (not obviously an abusive monster) said, ‘didn’t ask for ID’ – took their tribute in sexual encounters without concerning themselves with the age of those they were exploiting. Another tweet caught my attention, in the timeline of ...”

“... flight by hydrogen balloon in 1783 as ‘a sort of physical rapture’, and the American pioneer John Wise insisted that the experience ‘never fails to produce exhilaration … the mind is illuminated.’ Yet what goes up must come down: ballooning’s Achilles’ heel, the impossibility of setting one’s direction of travel, means that even the most ...”