“... community after talks between the Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams, and the SDLP leader, John Hume. Milltown was thus the feared or presumed setting for a showpiece atrocity, the funeral a shop-window for Loyalist marksmanship and ordnance-nous. It was a cold afternoon, but tension just shaded it, driving out the cold. The air above the city was ...”

“... legal text of considerable historical importance) was lifted from the work of Elisha Qimron and John Strugnell: ‘It must be a miracle that [the Eisenman-Wise] edition made all the same joins and transitions between fragmentary manuscripts that Strugnell and Qimron made.’ Even allowing for more coincidences and grey areas of textual reconstruction than ...”

“... normally followed by a Hardyesque nemesis, and fall to the old social station, suggests that John Jorrocks, preposterous though he may seem, is a more realistic conception than Michael Henchard. Jorrocks is elected to the Commons at the end of Hillingdon Hall, but Surtees never wrote a sequel. Gash feels that ‘it requires, perhaps, some effort of the ...”

“... and rent a video while you did your laundry in machines named after movie stars; mine was called John Belushi. At 8.30 a.m., groups of kids in tie-died grunge were guzzling beer and nachos, and watching Rodney Dangerfield deliver double entendres about policemen’s balls on the big video screen. But Natalie and I had a running battle over my reluctance to ...”

“... Cruickshank, Rowlandson and Dent; and portrayed by Romney, Beechey, Hoppner, Matthew Peters and John Russell. Nor has she been entirely forgotten by posterity. To be sure, she was not even mentioned by name in Percy Fitzgerald’s two-volume life of King William IV, published in 1884. But she merited an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, there ...”

“... his contribution was, though he can be sharp enough at times – writing, for instance, of John Braine: ‘His copy was boring; so, on his visits to deliver it, was he.’ He appears to have been the impresario of most of the bright new talent that was assembled – a formidable roll-call including such names as Bernard Levin, Katharine Whitehorn, Alan ...”

“... memorialist of Ireland’s ancient past, from Crofton Croker to George Petrie, Sir William Wilde, John O’Donovan, Eugene Curry and a host of others has issued this same warning. What you see now will soon be visible no more; what you see now is only the remnant of what once was. There is, of course, a great deal of truth in this. All traditional cultures ...”

“... Selby and McCruiskeen: fantastic, jaunty and terrifying. And yet O’Nolan is not without issue. John Banville’s most recent novel, The Book of Evidence, catches unmistakably the voice and fate of the unnamed narrator of The Third Policeman. Both are murderers, laconic, fastidious, their imaginations stunned. Both find themselves in ‘a queer ...”

“... they teamed up in Paris for The Seven Deadly Sins (1933), commissioned by the exotic Edward James (John Betjeman’s original patron), in which Lenya and James’s wife Tillie Losch played Anna I and Anna II. Offstage, the two Annas conducted an affair with each other. The Countess of Oxford and Asquith, reviewing the London production of The Seven Deadly ...”

“... War (Walzer endorses this opposition without offering any justification) and for his criticism of John Dewey and Walter Lippmann for writing pro-war propaganda. He is also (like all those up to this point in the rankings) considered methodologically sound by Walzer: ‘studying and clarifying the ideas of American democracy’ was, Bourne said, the ...”

“... though they have knowledge of each other’s work and exchange compliments through their friend John Kenyon. The 573 letters of the courtship alone (1845-6) lie ahead; further on are the rich records of the Brownings’ life in Italy, and then the less familiar, and therefore more often surprising, documents of Browning’s later years. (Here, too, the ...”

“... taller buildings, hotels of magnificence, a convention centre. In Watsonville the City Manager, John Radin, toured the streets, civil engineer in tow. Radin dreams of a Watsonville renewed in the image of Santa Rosa, a metastasising node on the lymph glands running north from San Francisco. To observant citizens there seemed to be a politically coherent ...”

“... manual forty years later.’ There are occasional cross words – a fairly dignified row with John Lehmann and some bickering with Kingsley Martin. All this is more interesting than the political letters, at any rate as they are here represented, though there remains much to be said for Woolf’s ‘peculiar’ socialism, which was ...”

“... conspiratorial existence of one Angelo Basarovi, a student in Verona, author of a dissertation on John Ashbery, dabbler in bleak homosexual affairs, and manic pursuer of fees and rake-offs for his skills as a business translator. The plot of the novel involves trips to Germany, Turkey, Scandinavia and America; traffic in a once-legal but now possibly ...”

“... been ‘gotten rid of’ as a security risk because of her good relations at the same time with John and Robert Kennedy. He has dinner at Nelson Rockefeller’s New York apartment, but assures his Soviet readers that he sat amid the opulence thinking of the homeless, the unemployed, the underfed and the oppressed blacks on the streets of New York ...”