“... chose either to emphasise or obfuscate that fact. (One masterpiece of dishonest revisionism, John Hall’s translation of 1652, begins He that sits next to thee now and hears Thy charming voyce, to me appears Beauteous as any Deity That rules the skie. How did his pleasing glances dart Sweet languors to my ravish’d heart At the first sight though ...”

“... books under review belong to very different genres, both of which are relevant to this task – John Willett’s a critical and historical study based on many years as reviewer, English editor and translator of Brecht, Ronald Hayman’s a lively, detailed biography – though the first turns out to be far the more expert, original and ...”

“... 500,000 dollars to the publisher of the Boston Post once that paper had declared its Support for John Kennedy’s Senatorial campaign, or that he prevented his son from making the anti-McCarthy speeches that his Democratic aides had prepared (or that John Kennedy had supported Nixon’s Senatorial campaign against Helen ...”

“... follows a remarkable passage: ‘Among the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter ...”

“... country – Churchill most obstinately of all. Guy Burgess was one of those – James Klugmann and John Cornford were the chief – who helped to induct me into the Party. We belonged to the same college, and hence to the same ‘cell’. I remember Burgess as a rather plump, fresh-faced youth, of guileless, almost cherubic expression. I heard him spoken of as ...”

“... you prefer the Brady Bunch to the Partridge family, for instance, as Uma Thurman wants to know of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, is simultaneously a test, a cultural allusion and a send-up of the whole idea of culture. The funniest moment in Pulp Fiction concerns Harvey Keitel, come to clean up after John Travolta and ...”

“... thoughts against thoughts in groans grind. For too long, Bishop had lived these moral choices of life/death, right/wrong, male/female: but at last, the early happy years with Lota had made them seem irrelevant, and Bishop, longing for Paradise since her blighted childhood, felt she had found it at Santarém: That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther; more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile in that conflux of two great rivers ...”

“... was not always in compliance with the law or legal standards of the time. It is true, as Ann and John Tusa argue in their definitive study of the Nuremberg trials, that the court was deliberately constituted as a military tribunal and was therefore exempt from the rigorous conditions of a civil court. There can be little excuse, however, for its adoption of ...”

“... the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. ‘The Circus’, it’s worth recalling, is what John Le Carré called his fictional spy headquarters.And then​ there was Peter Sichel, a German Jew from a family who had lost their wine business to the Nazis. He had escaped to Bordeaux and, after France fell, to the US via Spain. Aged nineteen, he enlisted ...”

“... to write directly about paintings if they do not care about them too much. Nothing in the mass of John Koethe’s verse and philosophical prose, for instance, suggests that paintings haunted him continually in anything like the way they did Herbert. (If I do him an injustice, I apologise.) But this seems to have meant that when he spent an hour or two with ...”

“... a powerful physical response. In a recent essay on Francis Bacon in the New York Review of Books, John Richardson recalls that Bacon aimed his images of his friend George Dyer ‘at the nervous system’, and adds that a ‘woman admirer’ told him they did indeed induce ‘a visceral shudder’. That the shudder should be described as a violent physical ...”

“... complicated the issue. When debate on Allen’s resolution began the following day, Senator John P. Hale (New Hampshire) proposed an amendment that the French were also to be congratulated for ‘manifesting the sincerity of their purpose by instituting measures for the immediate emancipation of the slaves of all the colonies of the republic’. This ...”

“... relatively simple one of whether no means no or yes, but what else even a genuine no might mean. John Forrester puts the matter very well in Dispatches from the Freud Wars (1997) when he asks how we tell the difference between ‘a patient’s independent judgment of psychoanalysis’ and ‘a negative transference’. ‘That is the fundamental problem in ...”

“... in these programmes, ‘we had arrived big-time on the political scene.’ Adams and the SDLP’s John Hume together worked out the theological basis for what, after many drafts, was to become the British-Irish Downing Street Declaration of December 1993 – the document which paved the way for the IRA ceasefire of August 1994. The programmes give most of the ...”

“... were published in magazines or appeared within stories but were never independently collected. John Goodby takes a much more permissive line, incorporating poems of all sorts and arranging them in chronological order – rather than, as Davies and Maud did, placing them in the order they assumed in the volumes in which they originally appeared. This ...”