“... striking attitudes with the duff public art we passed along the way. Our most love to loathe is John Ravera’s In Town, an anodised couple chucking their malshapen baby between them, which stands at the southern end of Battersea Bridge. We stopped at a vintage comic store in Putney where the proprietor, although a ringer for Comic Book ...”

“... it’s being republished now with the open aim of reaching the sizeable audience that resurrected John Williams’s Stoner and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road. All three books share an interest in sad marriages and a certain amount of diffuse self-pity, but strenuous Flaubertian realism as practised on a mid-20th-century American campus, provided in ...”

“... her fault, poor dear. Twenty years earlier she might have been trading poisoned darts with John Barrymore. But she and her sorority sisters were condemned to representing a girdled, uplifted world whose only edges were in the bones and stitching of their foundation garments. Faced with so much overwhelmingly off-putting evidence, the feminists, and ...”

“... himself with a friend, surf journalist Marcus Sanders. Their translation is into the vernacular of guy inarticulateness, with a little slang, which is to say its frequent awfulness must be intentional. Throughout most of the English-speaking world, citizens speak English like, well, native speakers, and the ability to speak well is a pleasure and a power. But ...”

“... an express elevator. It is a cultivated essence of shop-window shrines and Pentecostal chapels (John Wesley with tambourines, lugubrious and off-pitch). Its own particular harsh pure green is raised and reinforced until it becomes an architecture. It is to green what a snowball is to white, an impactment. Although Brainard was raised a Methodist, these ...”

“... Having seen the TV programme on which it was based I’ve been reading Britten’s Children by John Bridcut. Glamorous though he must have been and a superb teacher, I find Britten a difficult man to like. He had his favourites, children and adults, but both Britten and Pears were notorious for cutting people out of their lives (Eric Crozier is mentioned ...”

“... back on stage a year later and complained he had lost ‘$35 million in an hour’. The journalist John Hockenberry was fired from New York Public Radio when old allegations of workplace bullying were suddenly deemed sufficient. This happened just before an article about his sexual behaviour was published. He is one of the few men who have attempted to write ...”

“... supporters seem to see limits to liberalism. On 20 February the Free Church Daily Mail columnist John MacLeod tweeted that ‘Kate Forbes was thrown untold gotcha questions today about same-sex marriage etc, but handled them well. I unaccountably missed all the interviews when Humza Yousaf was asked about how he felt about suicide-bombers and the sort of ...”

“... Michèle Bernstein stated simply. ‘And there was the father we loved, Dada.’ Her partner, Guy Debord, gave this triangulation a dialectical flourish in The Society of the Spectacle: ‘Dadaism sought to abolish art without realising it; Surrealism sought to realise art without abolishing it. The critical position since developed by the Situationists ...”

“... steals The Magnificent Seven not through hat-waving and underplaying, but because he laid siege to John Sturges to persuade him to increase the size of his role, and was charming and animated on-screen while everyone else was busy being dour. Charles Bronson and James Coburn were underplaying each other into inanimacy; Brynner was playing Gary Cooper. McQueen ...”

“... The Stud and Confessions of a Sex Maniac. Hodge had a colourful line in ex-boyfriends, including John Bindon, an actor-gangster who had holidayed with Princess Margaret and was tried for murder. The days of wine and roses for the pre-hyphenated Windsors left a few stains on the carpet, but the royals still acted as if they were beyond reproach.Mummy loved ...”

“... among his many books, seems to give pride of place to a blockbuster history of the Cold War. Dr John Lewis, editor of the Modern Quarterly, so far from being, as Inglis would have it in one of his punchy characterisations, a ‘hard nut’ of the Communist Party, was an ex-Unitarian minister, much given to moral discourse and retaining a distinctly clerical ...”

“... unlikely or even impossible: man of courage and conscience turned into coward and traitor; other guy crowned Fittest Commander-in-Chief by a Mile. The equation is beyond easy comprehension. But that is what happened. Days before the New York convention began, Bush was beginning to pull away from his opponent, who was considered not to have responded ...”

“... who warmly sympathised with Hitler’s politics. (How many of these people also know that John F. Kennedy was an early supporter of America First?) But the underlying question was not whether Trump was giving a secret signal to anti-Semites – among his biggest supporters are the prime minister of Israel and the mayor of Jerusalem – but rather what ...”

“... Petite, just five feet tall, though a bit too plump to be an ideal cox, she fell for the guy between whose outstretched legs she had to plant her feet as she steered the boat with a loop of string. Having been a cox myself, of a house four when I was 12, I know the peculiar intimacy between cox and stroke: the rub of leg on leg, the intense eye ...”