“... science fiction, poetry, crime. The tools of the trade: as well as philosophy (by his brother John among others), French literature and plenty of proper angst-and-pepper stuff in several languages. The bungalow, screened off from a quiet street (flags, palm-trees, car-ports, a patch of grass on which a large rabbit sometimes appears), is unpretentious and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hearings, serves on the National Security Council; Reagan’s national security adviser John Poindexter until recently headed the Pentagon’s new counterterrorism unit; John Negroponte, former ambassador to Honduras, is now ambassador to the UN. Jeanne Kirkpatrick is on the board of the International Republican ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... digression, exposition, all done with stylish dispatch, admirably rendered by the translator, John Howe. Closer to a looped sequence of essays than a memoir, the book nonetheless shows off the memoirist’s skill to stunning effect in three somewhat unflattering portraits – Castro, Guevara and Mitterrand – and reminds us that distance and disloyalty ...”

“... were no special exemptions for a particular class or social category. As a result, the historian John Brewer has noted, although ‘there were occasional attacks on revenue officers, these were usually carried out by professional smugglers rather than by outraged taxpayers.’ But grumbling acquiescence (the most any fiscal system can usually expect) to ...”

“... Everyone was connected, one way or another. Three of Albertina’s brothers – Jimmy, Francis and John – joined the occupation, along with their uncle, Eddie. ‘It was like no other department in Cammell Laird’s,’ Albertina says. ‘Because it was all younger lads. And it was full of comedians. It was a joy to go into work. You’d rather go into work ...”

“... existence under such titles as ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ and ‘What Makes a Life Significant’.John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle’s book is an anthology of these writings, from a letter James wrote when at Harvard Medical School in the 1860s to ‘A Pluralistic Mystic’, an argument against rationalising away mystical experiences that was published in ...”

“... McDonald has written (admiringly) of the ‘apparent fragility’ of the poems, and the critic John Lyon argued that ‘precariousness is a precondition of Longley’s art.’ Longley, who was all too familiar with protracted writer’s block, often spoke of precariousness in the sense that a poem might come but then again it might not. ‘I live from poem ...”

“... weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation’s security to constitute maximum peril,’ John F. Kennedy told the nation during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. ‘Nuclear weapons are so destructive and ballistic missiles are so swift that any substantially increased possibility of their use or any sudden change in their deployment may well be ...”

“... within the Axis of Resistance in nationalist rather than revolutionary terms. It is telling that John Mearsheimer has enjoyed a quiet renaissance among Iranian analysts sympathetic to security-minded elites, for whom the axis is seen less as an outgrowth of revolutionary mobilisation than as a strategy that has allowed Iran to avoid imperial encroachment and ...”

“... required to project a narrative and would be criticised by media pundits if it failed to do so. John McCain had his tale of captivity and endurance; Joe Biden recalled the car crash that killed his first wife and their two young children; Barack Obama had written a bestselling memoir. McCain’s first line of attack was to accuse Obama of being a celebrity ...”

“... made something out of Elizabeth’s being so upset that he did not come (she had cooked pheasant, John drove to the station) and, more interestingly, out of her decision to grovel rather than embarrass, and annoy, Herman by saying, here is the original letter, why on earth did you pretend to send a carbon? She knew, of course, Herman would never forgive her ...”

“... not intent on dismantling a philistine industrialism, but on adding a spot of imagination to it. John Stuart Mill did not reject Benthamism; he simply mixed it with a creative dash of Coleridge. The more aggressive choice for art was to beat science at its own game – to insist that it was itself a form of cognition, but one far superior to the reflections ...”

“... who first tried to assassinate a unionist politician, shooting the hardline Stormont minister John Taylor six times yet failing to kill him. All this meant the Officials could compete with the Provos for support in Derry and West Belfast, but it didn’t sit well with the nominal goal of the movement, which was the reform of the Northern Irish state, not ...”