“... The most significant predecessor and rival to Foster’s Pop painters in using such tactics was John Heartfield, whose near-weekly montages in aid of European communism in the 1930s came from his own mastery of the image world, a pictorial literacy otherwise unmatched, at least until the First Age of Pop. This is one reason Foster speaks as much to Pop ...”

“... of the information that War and Peace contains. Even novels in which almost nothing happens – John McGahern’s, for instance – will speak in historical whispers, aiming to ‘disimprison’, as Coleridge once said, ‘the soul of fact’. Beryl Bainbridge was one of the last of the pre-Google English novelists, the last, you might say, following ...”

“... is of a blinding, shadowless transparency, in which nothing is unexamined; this is perhaps what John Ashbery was talking about when he said, in a 1961 essay, that in reading Roussel one needs ‘some sort of protective equipment’. Cocteau’s characterisation of Roussel’s work as genius in the ‘pure state’ is misleading, though, since many of its ...”

“... are usually given as George and Lady Mary Hamilton. The daughter appears to have been Sophia St John Hamilton. Just then Foscolo was brushing up his English by reading Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, which he later translated into Italian. The Hamiltons’ dashing and accommodating captor, according to one account published under the pseudonym Captain ...”

“... Iraqis were killed in March. American politicians ran for cover. While I was in Baghdad in March, John McCain visited, at the same time as Dick Cheney. Both expressed confidence that security was improving. McCain told CNN that Muqtada’s ‘influence has been on the wane for a long time’. Two weeks later, he denied he had ever said such a thing; what he ...”

“... structure of haemoglobin won him the Nobel Prize for chemistry, which he shared with his colleague John Kendrew. There is a surprisingly frank description of Perutz’s secondary research interest in his official Nobel biography for that year: ‘Perutz has pursued one sideline concerned with glaciers, studying their crystal texture and mechanism of flow, but ...”

“... The opening scene of Night Work, Thomas Glavinic’s Viennese novel, recalls something Karl Kraus said about the city in 1914: Vienna was a ‘Versuchsstation des Weltuntergangs’, an experimental station for the apocalypse. Jonas, Glavinic’s protagonist, gets up one morning and switches on the TV. There is no picture, only snow. He checks the post, but the paper hasn’t been delivered ...”

“... been dealt with explicitly by other writers: Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Grace Nichols and Tom Leonard, to name a few. For some, ‘literary art’ is a territory to be attained (Harrison’s ‘we’ll occupy/ your lousy leasehold, poetry’), in others a rule-book to be torn up (Agard’s ‘mugging de Queen’s ...”

“... 21 soldiers in May, the lowest monthly figure since February 2004. But this doesn’t mean that John McCain is right to believe that given enough resolve the American army is on the road to victory. The reason for the drop in American casualties is that the Sunni Arab and Shia Arab communities in Iraq are fighting low-level civil wars. Part of the old ...”

“... Yeats was prematurely describing her as a woman stricken with age, she had a delirious affair with John Quinn, the American lawyer who was the great, almost indispensable, patron of the Yeats family. Foster, noting that her son, Robert, unlike Sir William, was short, allows himself (hiding the news in a note at the back of his huge book) to report local gossip ...”

“... in Fallujah are becoming more confident. In one attack in February they almost killed General John Abizaid, the US Middle East commander, and in another they overran the police headquarters, killing some twenty men. The soldiers in the specialised units of the 82nd Airborne Division sound a little perplexed by the sort of war they are fighting. At a base ...”

“... the Lion Woman’, ‘Chang the Chinese Giant’, ‘Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy’ and John Merrick, the ‘Elephant Man’. But by the turn of the century, the mood of the public had changed and the public display of such ‘human prodigies’ – as they preferred to be called – had become unacceptable in many countries. The profession of ...”

“... The Inner Circle is written in the first person, unlike Boyle’s earlier book; its narrator is John Milk, a character based closely on Clyde Martin, Kinsey’s first employee at the nascent Institute for Sex Research. According to Paul Gebhard, quoted in Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s biography of Kinsey, Martin was also the last person Kinsey fell in love ...”

“... Venetian Bleeding Glass, a late 19th-century paean to this vanishing tradition of extravagance, John Freeman Knott, a Dublin doctor, mourns the passing of such times, which he calls the ‘primrose days of phlebotomy’. The consultant explained that the collection tubes are pre-filled with different chemicals, which allow the blood to be kept in the ideal ...”

“... their work, especially when it manifested itself as self-conscious ordinariness in poets such as John Masefield and Wilfred Gibson. Thomas felt that trying to be down to earth was part of the same problem; instead he wanted a poetry whose interplay of self-expression and common forms would always make it mean more than the writer could choose or control ...”