“... make a comprehensive move towards more open government in the manner discussed by Clive Ponting, John Ranelagh, Michael Zander and Simon Lee in Freedom of Information … Freedom of the Invididual?, a new collection of essays edited by Julia Neuberger. Three newspapers are currently being sued and two others prohibited from carrying material that discusses ...”

“... When satire becomes surrealistic it drops off the map of genre. Unlike other Amis characters (John Self, Keith Talent, Clint Smoker), the arch-lout Asbo doesn’t carry around a name whose oddity and associations he is forbidden by the rules of the novel that contains him from recognising. He changed his name on his 18th birthday to harmonise with the ...”

“... it works in ‘Homer’s Phobia’, from Season Eight of The Simpsons, first broadcast in 1997. John Waters provides the voice of a dealer in ‘collectibles’ who admires the family’s style, assuming it’s knowingly camp. Even Homer’s record collection – The New Christy Minstrels, Ballads of the Green Berets – presses every button on the jukebox ...”

“... and Josephine abandoned their new house, and in the autumn of 1906 moved to 4 Marlborough Road, St John’s Wood, where they spent the rest of their lives. A photo taken in the back garden shows Chester wearing a suit, Josephine in a deckchair. It wasn’t Crag Head. The garden had a single pear tree, which they jokingly called ‘the orchard’. In 1908 ...”

“... pastoral balm akin to the American Scene Regionalist paintings of Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry. ‘You hear those banjoes ringin’, darkies singin’’ Armstrong continues, the lyrics almost washed away by his majestic trumpet solo. The song looks worse, literally, in a 1935 movie short by trumpeter Red Nichols and His Five ...”

“... also fed up with being mocked and derided, pulled out of the meeting at short notice, leaving John Singer Sargent to attend on his own. The British generals are said to have been horrified when Sargent opened Thayer’s valise. According to Richard Murray of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the prototype garment resembled an old hunting ...”

“... he would have been disappointed. There was some half-hearted praise from Movement types, but when John Carey, for example, needed an honourable popular writer to batter the highbrows with in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), he turned to Arnold Bennett. Morgan’s biography had a memorable centrepiece: a description of the senile Maugham crapping on ...”

“... his ninetieth birthday, Ferrari hosted a lunch for all his employees. A few months later, Pope John Paul II came to visit him. The papal helicopter landed at the Circuito di Fiorano, Ferrari’s private test track near Maranello, on the morning of 4 June 1988. Twenty thousand Modenese workers were there, from Ferrari and other local firms, even including ...”

“... opinion, he simply saw himself as being above the ‘rules of the game’. The incomparable John Vincent has his own interpretation of the supposed liberalism of Mosley’s early days: ‘There were no depths of idealism to which he would not stoop in his attempt to find a winning formula for controlling the post-war mind.’ Inflamed by the ...”

“... good, we should be grateful for what they have offered us, which is certainly ‘good enough’. John Roemer’s book addresses an entirely different set of questions. It takes a long, hard look at some classical concepts in Marxism and, in doing so, transforms them completely. Before I go on to explain and discuss his views, I should mention that I am ...”

“... we do not practise ourselves. One of the keynotes of our epoch was struck by the Civil War radical John Warr who, writing in 1649, looked for ‘a spirit of understanding big with freedom and having a single respect to people’s rights’ (a phrase a hundred and fifty years ahead of its time). Warr contended that justice was anterior to law and postulated as ...”

“... New York and the other some weeks later in Salzburg, in a lean, semi-staged concert rendition by John Eliot Gardiner and his period-instrument Orchestre Romantique et Révolutionnaire. This was followed, again in Salzburg, by Georg Solti conducting several staged performances of Fidelio, and in New York by Kurt Masur and the NY Philharmonic doing one ...”

“... I ran away.’ I was never able to, and never even considered it. One day my mother announced that John Gielgud was coming to Cairo to perform Hamlet at the Opera House. ‘We must go,’ she said with infectious resolve, and indeed the visit was duly set up, although of course I had no idea who John Gielgud was. I was nine ...”

“... their arm and said: ‘Listen!’ I’m glad I was alone, because, so help me, it was only Elton John. The music was so nearly drowned out by the ship’s engines that I’d just caught the top notes. I bent down, stuck my ear to the speaker and yes, it was Elton John, singing, of all things: ‘Don’t let the sun go down ...”

“... briefly (as he did in recording, for Larkin’s delight, his response to an unimpressive poem by John Wain): ‘Could of told you that, shitface.’ Amis was not born into the literary purple, as many of the Bloomsburyish or Bloomsbury-affiliated writers of the previous generation had been, and this humbler background was thought to be somehow explanatory of ...”