“... of female bodies, there’s an echo of that other Pennsylvanian who wanted to be Nabokov: John Updike. Deservedly famous among Lutz aficionados is the tour de force index that comes at the climax of the final story in his first collection, ‘Not the Hand but Where the Hand Has Been’:Daughter: approaches to the body of, 00; as baby of the ...”

“... will themselves have become as extinct as the ones that science fiction once expressed. (John Clute, quoted here, considered the entire genre a ‘set of fairytales about the afterlife’.) To read this book is to become infected with a fascination I hadn’t realised Mars held. By the end I was left feeling a strange, even European twinge of envy. I ...”

“... of mise en scène and all-round plausibility, The Emperor of Ocean Park lies somewhere south of John Grisham and north of Nancy Drew. It is long-winded, shoddily put together and riddled with repetitions and small inconsistencies: characters are introduced twice, facts stated and restated as if for the first time; a pool table appears mid-scene (as if from ...”

“... he be required to remove his trousers. Lowe, it turns out, was a sergeant-major in the war, and John Le Mesurier, who played the limp Sergeant Wilson, was a captain. Now Lowe was playing a bank manager who had come up the hard way, and Le Mesurier, his chief clerk, was a pampered ex-public schoolboy, incapable of giving orders (‘Oh, Wilson! Bark it ...”

“... of us outgrow too well; the madness of adolescence, ‘just a face we are going through’, as John Lennon once said; the madness of love, where the only sanity would be a proper respect for our folly and an attempt not to do harm; autism; schizophrenia; depression; and our failure to find any sanity in our hunger for money (‘money gives people an ...”

“... law did not allow them to be confiscated. The PSI is the brainchild of the unapologetically brash John Bolton, who served as under-secretary of state for arms control and international security during Bush’s first term, before being nominated, to the consternation of most career diplomats, as US ambassador to the UN. Bolton is an accomplished international ...”

“... outcome of individual idiosyncrasies. ‘What makes a book good is what you leave out,’ John Garraty once remarked. Obviously, selection is crucial in a work that tries to cover five centuries. But in this case, too much has been left out of the story, especially once the book reaches the 20th century, when the US acted most forcefully as an empire ...”

“... It also takes Ozick a lot of literature to produce a little literature. As much as Borges or John Barth, she is a metafictional author: her subject is books and writers; obsessive readers, people driven to distraction by fiction. Lars Andemening, the protagonist of her third novel, The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), is an orphaned Swedish book reviewer who ...”

“... Nero in a very different mode from the Antichrist. The sixth-century historian-cum-fantasist John Malalas gives him the honour of executing Pontius Pilate: ‘Why did he hand the Lord Christ over to the Jews,’ his Nero asks, ‘for he was an innocent man and worked miracles?’ How, Champlin asks, can we account for these discordant versions? Why was ...”

“... and Bs remain a cut above the monthly supply from the Red Cross.’ Reviewing Flaubert’s Parrot, John Updike complained that ‘some of the metaphors are foppishly spun out.’ He had a point: in Barnes’s novels, almost every striking detail is sooner or later recapitulated as a simile or metaphor. Flaubert’s Parrot tells an amusing anecdote about ...”

“... commentary on the Colombian president’s epigram in 1948, he does believe, like the journalist in John Ford’s film The Man who Shot Liberty Valance, that when the legend becomes the truth, one should print the legend. García Márquez is giving us lots of (already shaped) history, and subjecting that history to acts of shaping that are most ...”

“... accounts of enlightened enquiry. Unlike Dava Sobel’s popular caricature of the clockmaker John Harrison, for example, Pancaldi’s carefully characterised Volta was not a solitary persecuted genius hunting the solution to the great scientific problem of his time. Other equally ludicrous fables of the progress of science and technology tell us that the ...”

“... send them to London to be tabulated and – somehow – synthesised to reveal the laws of the air. John Locke was one of scores of weather-watchers who interleaved their observations with entries in journals and commonplace book jottings. The diurnal rhythms of most of an adult life could be set by the metronome of the morning measurements of temperature, air ...”

“... when the photographer is as eloquent and canny as Arbus obviously was. The worse your art is, John Ashbery once remarked, the easier it is to talk about. What is truly odd about Arbus’s work is not her subject-matter, but how difficult it is to conceive of not talking about it in psychological terms. And I don’t mean, as an alternative to ...”

“... had no interest in direct political action against the bombers and racists of Birmingham, Alabama, John Rice made a passionate speech to the campus in 1970 to commemorate the students killed at Kent State, calling them ‘young people who gave their lives for the cause of freedom and for the cause of eliminating useless war’. He went on: ‘As I look out at ...”