“... myself understood, the more it becomes obvious that he will never escape condemnation, the thing John Major called for more of in his statement at the time of the trial. I have dreams about the boys, and sometimes dream I am the person in the CCTV footage who walks past them with a shopping bag at the exact moment they abducted James. I can see the ...”

“... Paul’s Letters to His Kinsfolk, was a bestseller. Another antiquary who was at Hougoumont, John Gage (1786-1842), left an account that is more personal and more chilling than Scott’s, in a journal kept during a visit that was, for him too, a first taste of foreign travel. Gage was 29 in the summer of 1815. From an old-established family of Suffolk ...”

“... to put up with. The author’s note in The Sweetest Dream is more than a metafictional trick, like John Ray Jr, PhD’s foreword to Nabokov’s Lolita, the outsider’s perspective on the mad and repellent Humbert Humbert, telling us it’s all right to sit back and enjoy the perversions of others. This is Doris Lessing: not playful, not one for fun, the ...”

“... ramping up the discourse of a New Cold War – considerably improving the electoral prospects of John McCain, whose foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann worked for Saakashvili until May this year. All this, in exchange for a short war the US didn’t have to fight. The outcome for Russia, meanwhile, has been negative: not only has it been demonised, but ...”

“... The death penalty provides another opportunity for criticism that will get nowhere. Tony Blair and John Howard were both quick to realise that resistance to the use of the ‘ultimate punishment’ in Saddam’s case would be futile. On Bush’s first trip to Europe as President, he dismissed international concern about the widespread use of capital punishment ...”

“... of us don’t know what to look for, however, and the aerial view is alien to our sense of scale. John Wise, the pioneering American aeronaut, thought he was looking at a waterfall in a pleasure-garden when he saw Niagara Falls from space. ‘I was disappointed, for my mind had been bent on a soliloquy on Niagara’s raging grandeur … The little frothy ...”

“... the two memoirs. Were Picasso able, from beyond the grave, to ban it, he would do so. The idea was John Richardson’s. He provides a contextual epilogue, taken more or less verbatim from the second volume of his mammoth Life of Picasso. Marilyn McCully (who is working on the third volume with Richardson) provides a foreword and biographical notes. Letters ...”

“... produced similar collections of the writings of Thomas Paine and his contemporaries in the 1790s, John Thelwall, Robert Owen and the British Utopians, and the responsibility for producing a Chartist canon could not have fallen into better hands. Few scholars can match Claeys’s ability to render 19th-century radicalism and socialism coherent by locating ...”

“... finally turns into majolica. The ‘plodding, patient, self-denying and taciturn’ apprentice John Heathcoat conjures the lace-making machine out of years of application, and lives to profit from it though besieged on right and left by patent-infringers and Luddites. The main point of these stories is to show how widely distributed talent is – or ...”

“... as an author photograph of him in existence, and such information as there is is recycled from John Fowles’s fighting introduction to this, his only book.) For a time in the 1920s he promised to be a literary figure, ‘the next D.H. Lawrence’ and then Lawrence’s intended biographer, but life had other, dimmer plans for him. The Book of Ebenezer Le ...”

“... outlook. Union and Unionisms is the most important addition to the pro-union bookshelf since John Robertson’s A Union for Empire back in 1995, but it’s also the portrait of a splendid graveyard, managed by ghouls and zombies determined to keep the rusty old gates open as long as they can. In a recent article for the New York Review of Books, Andrew ...”

“... if contested motif of the elderly sybarite – best known from the fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike – whose declining sexual picaresque is set against historical or social forces which leave the ageing roué flummoxed and rueful. The Escape, or rather its protagonist, evinces a worldview that is best described as aspirant Rothdike: all raging ...”

“... patiently, so that we might consider them too. (Other poets attached to similar theories – John Wilkinson, say – pursue them aggressively, rapidly, with the kind of pride that comes before a fall.) ‘We wake up to an empty room/addressing itself in scare quotes,’ as one poem has it; Armantrout’s style puts everything in scare quotes, including ...”

“... bottles, he was being much funnier with werewolves and tigers. Our little dialogues were between John and Mary; his, and how much better, between Bertie van Tahn and the Baroness. Even the most casual intruder into one of his sketches, as it might be our Tomkins, had to be called Belturbet or de Ropp, and for his hero, weary man-of-the-world at 17, nothing ...”

“... John Maltby​ , the studio potter and sculptor, used to say that you can’t make a teapot about your father’s death. Grayson Perry’s whole career assumes the opposite, that you can express any amount of personal and social comment through traditional forms of craft, not just pottery but tapestry and textile design: the Tate sells a printed silk headscarf of his that wouldn’t look out of place in a county town on market day, but represents contemporary art as a sort of board game, with arrival at the Bankside holy of holies (above the cheeky caption ‘Tat Moderne’) the winner’s reward ...”