“... But he does his best to enliven things with biographical vignettes. The revelation that John Ashbery was a radio Quiz Kid at the age of 14 does nothing to undermine my prejudices against his work, but the ever-catholic Perkins gives a sympathetic introduction. How far, though, is the book a history? By continual cross-cutting, Perkins gives an idea ...”

“... journalism, what is sometimes called ‘the literature of fact’: like others in the field, John McPhee for one, Lopez makes what could be dull textbook material appealing. He displays an almost god-like command of multitudinous fact, but he prevents it from becoming too abstract and lofty by constantly grounding it in personal experience. To ...”

“... to the Arabs because such a compromise would lead to Israel’s death; the second attacked John le Carré for suggesting that Israel might have over-reacted (‘It is as if we British had lost our temper with the IRA,’ le Carré had written in the previous week’s Observer, ‘and decided to punish the entire Irish people once and for all’); and ...”

“... as good as her opponents’ – which is no compliment to anyone. In the background, of course, is John Rawls’s naturalist doctrine of justice as fairness, and also the fear that if you go with Douglas you end up in cultural relativism. She tries to dispel the worry. We do compare systems of justice. As part of their stabilising function they must be ...”

“... and when Cuba’s remarkable reduction of poverty was seldom reported. ‘Our’ President, John F. Kennedy, had supported the assault on Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, and under his Administration the CIA had tried to kill Castro and sabotage Cuba’s economy. I was pleased, indeed proud, that one of my closest friends in the class was Don Herr, a Defense ...”

“... Edward Said’s essay about the Palestinians with photographs by Jean Mohr, who worked with John Berger, is a wonderful book. Text and images illustrate one another. The book is calculated to nourish and enlarge our sympathy and our imagination in just the way that social understanding requires. Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935, a Palestinian ...”

“... by tipsy reindeer – may be a tortuous folk-memory of this cult. According to the philologist John Allegro, if I remember his drift correctly, Jesus Christ was also a mushroom. More recently, the witches of Medieval Europe used such homely drugs as belladonna, henbane and mandrake, both in their role as crypto-medical ‘wise-women’ – the atrophine in ...”

“... to be small, ugly, ignorant and coarse. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge had known her before she met John Hatfield, a bigamist who tricked her into a fraudulent marriage, and both men were united in their venomous hatred of her seducer. Yet Hatfield, whose exploits eventually brought him to the gallows, was, as Bragg shows, one of the popular heroes of the ...”

“... is and is not. The story, reprinted in Peake’s Progress, first appeared alongside stories by John Wyndham and William Golding in 1956, in a collection called Sometime, Never. Taken together the three stories read more like fables than fantasy or science fiction, and they glance curiously at the contemporary world they are not directly seeking to ...”

“... creation became the basis for Scientology’s recruitment of Hollywood celebrities – Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Juliette Lewis, Kirstie Alley, Peaches Geldof – who serve as evidence that the religion makes the ‘able more able’. Even William Burroughs, during his brief stint in the church, was featured in Freedom bragging that he’d become a more ...”

“... Hopper missed mixing it with the hard-drinking rabble-rousers, Flynn, Bogart and Sinatra, while John Wayne, with whom he acted in The Sons of Katie Elder and True Grit, called him a Communist and offered to explain why he, Wayne, ‘was worth a million per picture’. Hopper was, however, perfectly on time for the upcoming group of heroes, mumbling geniuses ...”

“... a little different if they had. In a number of the essays collected here Popper sounds a lot like John Rawls, who emphasised the importance of distributive justice and the need for social policies that improve the lot of the least well-off: a far cry from Friedman’s market liberalism, and from the neoliberalism of today. This was a road not ...”

“... of thousands of civilians. In Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to al-Qaida, John Mueller argues that the nonproliferation regime was responsible for these deaths, and for the staggering material costs of the war, and asks whether they were a price worth paying to prevent Saddam from getting a bomb – a bomb he would never have been able ...”

“... wasn’t thinking of anything that expensive’ – was sent in 1987, five years before John Major announced the ‘amicable separation’ of the royal couple. The image and the attitude are a sharp reminder of the mood of the decade that saw Carter’s reputation revive. It was, appropriately, a time when monstrous females stalked the land. Diana ...”

“... is the only British prime minister ever to have been assassinated? But both he and his nemesis, John Bellingham, are more interesting than this implies, and the fatal act that brought them together, Andro Linklater thinks, is more significant and also more mysterious. They have been the subject of two previous books, by Mollie Gillen (1972) and David ...”