“... going to get it done hard and fast and get out. Winning – as a famous old football coach called John Madden likes to say on his radio segment in San Francisco – is a great deodorant. But now they’re calling in the script doctors, fast. But wait. Here comes Osama’s right-hand no-good, Ayman al-Zawahiri, appearing on al-Jazeera with a picture of the ...”

“... between being a memory and being only a memory. On 30 December 2003, Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, sat down to dinner in their apartment in New York. They had been married for forty years. They had had their fights, they had thought about divorce, but there they were. ‘Marriage is memory,’ Didion writes, ‘marriage is time.’ Their ...”

“... to be made from them: he cites the popularity of the high-carb, low-protein diets promoted by John Harvey Kellogg and Sylvester Graham with their accompanying special products – cereal and crackers. ‘If you advocate a low-carb diet, the food industry sees you as a problem,’ he writes, suggesting that this is at the root of a backlash against ...”

“... shimmering slightly, but with a wooden dullness behind the eyes. There is a poem attributed to John Skelton called ‘The Harmony of Birds’, in which a chorus of fowl sing individually and together in praise of God. The poet takes a walk in the countryside, and stops by a tree, ‘Whereon dyd lyght/Byrdes as thycke/As sterres in the skye,/Praisyng our ...”

“... master of ceremonies, unwilling or unable to prevent himself interrupting the proceedings. As John Bayley put it a few years back, one primary object of a Barnes novel ‘is to dazzle and bemuse the reader throughout with the knowledge and reminder that this is a very clever young person writing a very clever and witty novel’. The most obvious ...”

“... In the polarised atmosphere of George III’s reign, a host of political clubs took root. John Wilkes’s success in mobilising antigovernment sentiment during the 1760s owed much to a battery of radical associations, including the Anti-Gallican, Beefsteak and Albion clubs, and the masonic lodges. From the 1790s the Society for Constitutional ...”

“... New Writing 8, 1999), the extract was called ‘Brief Lives’. So a good starting point might be John Aubrey, but perhaps it would be better to begin with Anthony Powell, the standard biographer of the first great English biographer. In his introduction to Aubrey’s Brief lives, Powell points out a significant difference between his approach to biographical ...”

“... and public policy from them. This is the opinion of many who practise philosophy in the manner of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. Philosophical reflection on the nature of toleration, Newey contends, shows that this is wrongheaded. It is, Lord knows, not the abstraction that Newey objects to, but – quite rightly – the conceit that philosophical reflection ...”

“... collective movements clean when they performed at the Barbican last month.* Whereas in the work of John Cage, whose music often accompanied Cunningham’s dances, randomness seemed a rediscovery of the sounds found in ‘nature’, most notably in the sounds of the quiet concert hall with which he filled 4l33ll, there was nothing natural about Cunningham’s ...”

“... say they are hard to beat. To my shame, I have to admit to a growing inclination to agree with John Major’s once dismaying view that we should understand less and condemn more – as least in the face of Gilmore’s gathering of pop-psychoanalytic excuses for the sorry state of gender relations the world over. In the end the patchwork of woman-hating ...”

“... role.’ Turning the page, readers discovered mat Monday’s Radio 1 schedule included ‘John Peel ... live in Manchester with Number One Cup in session and poetry from sex-bard Simon Armitage’. Armitage’s ability to play goalkeeper in both divisions, to two-time Radio 1 and Radio 3, to learn not only from Heaney but from Peel (about whom he has ...”

“... At a New York cocktail party shortly after the war, a young and insecure physics postgraduate was heard to blurt out to a woman he had met there: ‘I just want to know what Truth is!’ This was Thomas Kuhn and what he meant was that specific truths such as those of physics mattered less to him than acquiring metaphysical knowledge of the nature of truth ...”

“... merely quaint. His legacy hasn’t worn well. Compared with his closest American contemporaries, John Singer Sargent (also working in England), Thomas Eakins (determinedly homebound) and Mary Cassatt (moving between France and America), Whistler seems lightweight. He possessed neither Sargent’s bravura as a portraitist at the centre of the Anglo-American ...”

“... the USPS, Lennon picks up the low hum of the invisible republic. Like the eavesdropping couple in John Cheever’s ‘The Enormous Radio’, Mailman is a psychic receiver for the secrets of those around him. His precious archive of photocopied mail, built up over many years of invading his customers’ privacy, is the main reason for his emotional attachment ...”

“... symmetrical remakes, Matt Damon in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) and John Malkovich in a new Ripley’s Game by Liliana Cavani (2003). Although, on their own terms, all four are good movies, their Ripley is not Highsmith’s Ripley because they somehow humanise his inhuman core: Delon is a demoniac European; Hopper an ...”