“... 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 ...”

“... they’re disparaged at the wedding dinner. Her position in this story is perhaps something like John McGahern’s. ‘The collapse of the Church’s absolute power’ in Ireland, he wrote in ‘God and Me’, an autobiographical essay, ‘has brought freedom and sanity in certain areas of human behaviour after long suppression’, but also ‘a new ...”

“... observation while vindicating Newton’s theory. All went well until the mid-19th century, when John Couch Adams showed that Laplace’s calculations were incomplete and actually accounted only for about half of the observed effect. The apparent agreement between Halley and Laplace was ruined and nationalistic passions inflamed: Laplace was French and Adams ...”

“... not help Rossini and Verdi. Added to this, the operatic caravan is moving on. While the success of John Adams gives hope to those who think that contemporary opera has a future, the cultural pessimists are going further back in time to renew the repertory. Perhaps the Italian 19th century has hit a peak, and those who today boo Alagna and lament the loss of ...”

“... just as the whalers knew and named them. Old Tom was eventually betrayed by a crew led by Captain John Logan, who did not respect the law of the tongue, and tried to haul in a young humpback without allowing the orcas their due. Old Tom struggled against the whalers, losing some teeth in the process: when he was washed up dead sometime later, there were ...”

“... I made another personal discovery: Stuart’s mother was descended, through her mother, from John Rock Grosset, a pro-slavery Tory MP who owned a plantation in Portland. Further questions arose. What, beyond simple economic interest, turned people into active pro-slavers? What were they afraid of? How did they hope to stem the tide of abolitionism? How ...”

“... are logarithms, a type of mathematical operation first described by the Scottish mathematician John Napier in 1614. If you are multiplying a number p by itself to get another number q, the logarithm of q to base p is how many times you need to do the multiplication to reach q. So the logarithm of 8 to base 2 is 3, because you have to multiply 2 by itself ...”

“... at home from Latin, the language of the learned fathers. In the 14th century, the translator John Trevisa wrote that nurses ‘whilispith and semisouneth the wordis’ (‘mispronounce and semi-sound the words’) to the child. Mother Tongue is alert to the relationship between words and mothering. In Making Babies, Anne Enright writes that ‘all words ...”

“... Musyoka is unlikely to pose a serious threat. A few days after Odinga’s death, the journalist John Kamau published a tribute in the Daily Nation. ‘The House of Jaramogi has always lived in that uneasy space between power and its edges,’ he wrote. ‘They’ve shaped power from the outside, cut deals to sit inside, and left their fingerprints on every ...”

“... and reviews: 160 pages followed by a cod-serious bibliography put together by his publisher, John Lane. The opposite approach, resulting in much the same title, was proposed by the very-much-not-dandiacal Gustave Flaubert, then 24, in a letter of 1846 to his friend Maxime Du Camp: ‘Very often, I doubt that I shall ever publish a single line. Wouldn’t ...”

“... others. The assumption that ‘we only directly observe sense data’ was vigorously attacked by John Austin, and before him (and in different ways) by William James and by Husserl. The very question, ‘How does thought hook on to the world?’ was undermined by Wittgenstein. Yet, by and large, these attacks on the epistemological model – and without ...”

“... to provide whisky and cigars for his European guests (as well as slave-girls for those, like St John Philby, sensible enough to embrace Islam). He only banned alcohol for foreigners in 1952, after a British consul had been murdered by an inebriated Saudi prince. Nowadays the fleshpots of Europe provide a safety-valve for those rich enough to afford them. If ...”

“... whining that her only enemies are the press and a few disgruntled supporters of former mayor John Stein. Surrounding herself with fellow congregants from the Pentecostalist Wasilla Assembly of God and old school chums from Wasilla High, the 32-year-old mayor set about turning the town into the kind of enterprise society that Margaret Thatcher used to ...”