“... in the world,’ Franklin-Wallis writes, ‘that give you a better view of humanity than a dump.’John Scanlan​’s The Idea of Waste reminds us that waste is a relative concept. By this he means partly that what looks like waste to one person – to you and me, say – might not look like waste to one of the waste-pickers at Ghazipur. But more ...”

“... like the whiff of cordite long after the gun has been fired. When I mention this to David Cornwell/John le Carré, he says: ‘I can still feel it in my nostrils now.’ Historians, like spooks, need a sensitive nose, Orwell’s ‘Sniff, sniff’ for the detection of ‘all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls’.3 (And, in ...”

“... does not treat the actual life of Welles or its salient circumstances: his collaborations with John Houseman and Joseph Cotten and Michéal Mac Liammóir; his affairs with Dolores Del Rio and Lena Horne, and his marriage to Rita Hayworth; complicated relationships, usually rounded up to some sort of friendship, with the great producers of the day who used ...”

“... and the Chancellor incident of July 1982 stands as something of a monument to the process. John Chancellor is a leading American television commentator who arrived in Beirut during the siege and witnessed the destruction brought about by the indiscriminate bombing that was taking place all around him. The report he produced in full view of a vast ...”

“... Body. The serial stuff-strutters include the photo-artists Gilbert & George, Cindy Sherman and John Coplans; the sculptors Jeff Koons, Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn; the painters Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon and Jenny Saville; the performance and video artists Joseph Beuys, Rebecca Horn, Bruce Nauman, Arnulf Rainer and Matthew Barney. Their work commonly ...”

“... blow rather than the scrupulous fleck of paint. It’s as if Rodin had apprenticed himself to Gwen John, and that isn’t at all how their story played out. After The Ghost Writer Zuckerman became Roth’s stand-in of choice, in Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson, the three books being republished in 1985 as the trilogy Zuckerman Bound, with The Prague ...”

“... War. There were Kipling’s vivid stories of Sussex life through the ages, and then there was John Buchan’s The Path of the King, tracing ancestral virtues and vices from a Viking prince to Abraham Lincoln, taking in the depravities of Titus Oates. Even before reading these quite gripping books, we were vaguely acquainted, through schools, comics and ...”

“... his Presidential years. ‘To lunch at the Wyatts at Connock. Clarissa Eden, the Weinstocks and John Harris ... the Weinstocks and Clarissa all being surprisingly agreeable.’ ‘Drive to Isleworth and dinner with the Gilmours ... an enjoyable and interesting dinner.’ But if these were sometimes occasions for tittle-tattle and of no great interest ...”

“... first, Dora, dying suddenly at the age of eight months. Only a fortnight before that his father, John Dickens, had died after enduring a horrifying surgical operation (while his son looked on) without the benefit of anesthesia. His wife suffered for some time from a ‘nervous’ condition, perhaps post-natal depression, or perhaps simply exhaustion. In 1851 ...”

“... freely as terms of approval and abuse (often in relation to Britain and Hollywood respectively). John Caughie contributes a sharp set of notes on broadcasting and the cinema, among other things tracing the influence of Scottish Presbyterianism on Grierson and Reith. Barr, in another essay in the same vein, points out how radio was seen as socially cohesive ...”

“... of particular institutions in the style of Daniel Arasse’s vivid study of the guillotine or John Bender on the penitentiary, but rather an analysis of ideas which is concerned to trace intellectual continuities over a wide field of documentation. Thus although Wiener talks of ‘images’ and ‘depictions’, there is no discussion of visual ...”

“... more mutually supportive. It was not that the British were unaware of the dangers of this. Sir John Troutbeck, one of the two Ambassadors of the Fifties examined in the chapter by William Roger Louis, was outspokenly crit ical of the immense social gaps, and in his view Western education had only made the younger generation of Iraqis more narrow-minded ...”

“... Literature’, and log every instance, all the way from D.H. Lawrence and Anna Wickham through John Betjeman to Martin Amis, of one single placename’s use to connote a vast tundra of anodyne, apathetic anonymity. Here, though, Croydon is exactly where you’d expect Lodge to make his couple come from: a prompt for often disappointingly chummy humour at ...”

“... to have its closest affinities with recent cinematic exports such as Jane Campion’s Sweetie and John Ruane’s Death in Brunswick. (Particularly the latter, since in this novel Carey has made a brave and largely successful attempt to reflect the diversity of Australia’s immigrant culture, with all its attendant conflicts and resentments.) The Catchprices ...”

“... lighter in tonality, distinctly medieval in mood. Wycliffe reading his translation of the Bible to John of Gaunt, Chaucer and Gower present was started in 1847, a year before the foundation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Nevertheless it has the feel of a Pre-Raphaelite picture. Brown was never a member of the Brotherhood. But his steadfast professionalism ...”