“... and comparative mythography, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Bertrand Russell, J.B.S. Haldane and John Maynard Keynes (for being a renegade Eton-and-King’s man who thought the college needed shaking up). Lytton Strachey returned James’s contempt: ‘It’s odd that the provost of Eton should still be aged 16. A life without a jolt.’ The only modern ...”

“... arrangements Australia had inherited. Above all, in the minds of such conservatives as John Howard, it was designed to maximise Anglo-Australia’s guilt for what happened to the Aborigines; something for which late 20th-century Australians could not be held responsible. This was the ‘black armband’ school of history, a phrase ...”

“... to find too much going on’ there. The calm was disturbed by members of a new team assembled by John von Neumann, the legendary mathematician. Von Neumann too had spent much of the war at Los Alamos. There, he was gripped by a vision as remarkable as Charles Babbage’s a century before: perhaps one could build a machine to calculate. Von Neumann was ...”

“... after which a framing story loops back towards the book’s first sentence. Along with the Being John Malkovich effect that Hemon gets by surrounding Pronek with other versions of himself, all this just about dovetails with his thematic concerns. A sense of ‘stale disreality’ with regard to personal identity afflicts all his displaced characters sooner ...”

“... poverty and racism here and now, not wait for the collapse of the global capitalist order.’ John Caputo argued along these lines in After the Death of God (2007): I would be perfectly happy if the far-left politicians in the United States were able to reform the system by providing universal healthcare, effectively redistributing wealth more equitably ...”

“... story ‘The Animal in the Synagogue’ with the words: ‘Look away, look away, look away.’ John Wray and Nathan Englander in English and Alejandro Zambra in Spanish all have a phrase about the impossibility of getting rid of the creature – and I’m guessing that Etgar Keret has something similar in Hebrew. That’s certainly what Kafka says, to ...”

“... made a contentious move by including a science fiction story published in 1932 under the pseudonym John Shamus O’Donnell, claiming that there is ‘a compelling case for O’Brien’s authorship’ although ‘no archival material has been found to verify the story’s provenance. Electronic concordancing and corpus linguistics may be of some value here, but ...”

“... to condemn his Girondin enemies to the guillotine. In the United States, less violently, the young John Quincy Adams used it to portray Jefferson as a French-style revolutionary, and 30 years later, Jacksonian populists turned it with great success against Adams himself. Today, conservative American radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck use it to deny ...”

“... a different kind of anti-Whig historian – in George III and the Historians (1957), and from John Brewer, whose pioneering attempt to reconstruct the wider political culture of print, public opinion and street theatre in Namier’s home decade of the 1760s was tellingly entitled Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III ...”

“... Sartre and Beauvoir, Jean Genet and others – though none under B for Beckett, and none for John Berger, who was cool at first, then much warmer, coming under fire from David Sylvester – another S – for disparaging Giacometti’s work in the 1950s, and then for revising his opinion after the artist’s death in 1966. ‘Head of a ...”

“... onwards knew, even as they escalated the war, that Vietnam was a doomed cause. As early as 1964 John McNaughton, a Pentagon official, had written a memo that US objectives in Indochina were ‘70 per cent avoid a humiliating defeat … 20 per cent to keep South Vietnam (and the adjacent territory) from Chinese hands – 10 per cent to permit the people of ...”

“... managed to get home to Boston in 1787 after eight years’ absence. Davis’s near contemporary John Nicol was a romantic like Spavens: ‘I had read Robinson Crusoe many times over and longed to be at sea.’ He volunteered for the navy at Leith in 1776, as soon as he had finished his apprenticeship as a cooper, eager for the chance to visit China. Jacob ...”

“... Center has gone, and that others might be coloured by the emergence of the anthrax threat and John Ashcroft’s rise to power. It must have been tempting to introduce a phoney topicality, but with ‘so much fresh outrageousness being manufactured daily’, Franzen allowed himself only ‘minimal tinkering’. For Foden, the difficulties were more ...”

“... Scottish and Chinese forms of education, foiling in the process the ‘English Governor, Sir John Pope Hennessy, who wanted to impose a Western curriculum’. But Pope Hennessy was an Irish Catholic, who got into trouble first in Barbados and then in Hong Kong for what was viewed as excessive sympathy with indigenous peoples. When he made his ceremonial ...”

“... It would have been very much better to reprint some older critical essays – Sabine Rewald’s or John Russell’s for the Tate Gallery retrospective of 1968 – and some historic texts, such as Artaud’s catalogue preface for Balthus’s 1934 exhibition at the Galerie ...”