“... it is true that some American magazines, notably the New Yorker, have welcomed the talents of John McGahern, Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, Edna O’Brien and Benedict Kiely, among others, one could give long odds against a manuscript by an unknown Irish novelist or poet seeing the light of first publication in Boston or in New York.So it’s back to London ...”

“... claims into question.The modern​ appropriation of Phoenicia began in 16th-century Kent with John Foche, who was said to have ‘discovered’ that the first foreign visitors to Britain were the Phoenicians. Although Foche couldn’t know it, there is today one piece of evidence for a Phoenician presence on the British Isles, a tile excavated at Holt in ...”

“... were awkwardly placed in mid-Victorian Kensington. Their friends included the ageing Radical John Bright and Elizabeth Gaskell’s widower, William. But smart society was closed to them and this was something that Beatrix’s mother, Helen, seems to have minded deeply. A grim-faced little woman, she apparently occupied herself entirely with a round of ...”

“... of the town without consulting him. She never comes back. It is shrugged off very casually: King John (somebody told me) Said to a man he knew: ‘If people go down to the end of the town, well, what can anyone do?’ I used to recite it (in my day children were called on to torture visitors in this way), but while I enjoyed the rhythm and the pace, it gave ...”

“... and every description of the opus sounds dizzying. The 1976 selection of translations edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim contains ‘roughly five hundred poems’, while a German collected edition of 1967 has ‘approximately one thousand items’. The new book tells us that the latest complete works includes ‘more than two thousand poems’, of ...”

“... He next set his sights on the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, courted by its director, John Walker, with plans for a new building and murmurs of favourable tax rates. In 1949 and 1950, Gulbenkian sent a selection of his paintings to Washington, together with his Egyptian collection, which had been on loan to the British Museum since the 1930s. The ...”

“... When he arrived​ at the meditation retreat, a little south of Paris, Emmanuel Carrère was warned that he would be working with powerful psychic energies. ‘If for some reason you decide to leave mid-session,’ he and the fifty other men present were told, ‘you’ll throw the others off, and above all you’ll put yourself in danger.’ A noble silence descended ...”

“... Romania, for example. The problems were forcefully pointed out by the troops on the ground when John Major went to visit them in Kuwait after the war. He said that Options for Change would not be implemented until the lessons of the war had been analysed. However, Tom King, then the Secretary of State for Defence, had already promised to give the outline to ...”

“... or Kafka – the most ‘impressive’ names on his bookshelf are Isaac Asimov, Ursula Le Guin and John Wyndham – but at a village meeting to discuss what to do about a proposed Gypsy campsite, he reflects that ‘the villagers wanted the Gypsies to be gross, so the grossness of what they’re not acts as a stencil for what the villagers are.’ He has ...”

“... in horror from the emerging globe’. As he walks through the airport, he begins to imagine it as John F. Kennedy’s supine body, ‘with his legs and his arms outstretched, and leech-like aeroplanes sucking his toes and fingers’. It’s not a very good representation of the terror of arrival, but then Pronek is self-effacing and effaced, and this new ...”

“... of his ‘philosophical heroes’ as Dewey, James (W.; certainly not H.), Peirce, J.L. Austin, John McDowell, Husserl (with reservations) and, of course, Wittgenstein. Disappointingly, however, neither Putnam nor anybody else in his direct realist pantheon is prepared actually to offer an account of how perception works. Rather, ‘in my opinion, “direct ...”

“... found in the 13th and 14th centuries, in writers such as Vincent de Beauvais and, in particular, John Mandeville, who, in his (imaginary) Travels, projected his account of cuissage onto a distant world. According to Mandeville, the danger of deflowering a virgin was so keenly felt among certain primitive peoples that special young men – called ...”

“... good old Bob Boothby is in. Franz Rosenzweig is invisible, but there are four references to Lord John Russell. Forget Kafka, Freud, Durkheim, S.D. Luzzatto, Chagall, Sholom Aleichem and (aside from fleeting mentions) Mendele Moikher Seforim and J.L. Peretz. The last three were the most celebrated writers of the golden age of Yiddish literature: like all the ...”

“... the prose of the catalogue and the TV commentaries, where they are rather heavily underlined by John Tavener’s music for the title sequences. Still, the organisers encourage us to compromise, to substitute human for theological concepts, to accept the life and sufferings of Christ as ‘archetypes of all human experience’, conveying truths not just to ...”

“... published in 1867. The ungovernable girl Tempe is involved in a railway accident with her husband, John Darke. Darke’s father brings the news to Tempe’s mother, Roxalana, and her dour friend Argus. But there has been a mistake: it turns out to be Darke who has been killed, not Tempe: A bright smile burst over Roxalana’s face, and even the iron ...”