“... Drinking is part of the equation. I don’t mean to make it sound as if Antrim has become John O’Hara with a cell phone. No, a disciple of Barthelme conquers the territory of Cheever and Updike – it’s stunning. ‘Another Manhattan’, from 2008, the longest and most wrenching of these pieces, begins as if it’s going to be a simple farce or ...”

“... three-legged-race quality in consequence), but slowing the tempo has been an effective device for John Updike in The Witches of Eastwick and Hilary Mantel in Beyond Black. Both of these writers compensate with a stronger evocation of atmosphere, a finer descriptive grain, while Ishiguro opts for deceleration without a thickening of texture. There’s plenty ...”

“... good stuff to come along. In his personal life, in bars or on manly roustabouts with the likes of John Huston and the Rat Pack, Bogart was inclined to believe in ‘Bogart’ just as his fans did. ‘Bogart’s a hell of a nice guy until around 11.30 p.m. After that, he thinks he’s Bogart,’ a Beverly Hills restaurant owner once said. But there is ...”

“... Britain in the era of anti-Fascism. Broda’s protagonists do not belong in the shadowy world of John le Carré’s intelligence professionals or agents, or even the milieu of full-time Communist Party or Comintern functionaries, let alone the Party cadres trained into total identification with Moscow in institutions like the Lenin School. Their life was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... trauma. Smith aims to create a visual essay on the model of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas or John Berger’s celebrated montages in Ways of Seeing, but his album doesn’t yield meaning through thoughtful juxtaposition or surprising diachronic analogy; just bunching the pictures together, without a full discussion, leaches them of meaning, ignores the ...”

“... need to be some ‘democratic, accountable and supranational body’, similar to the one that John Boyd Orr hoped would be set up by the UN after the war: a World Food Board. This would integrate ‘transport, human and animal health, the environment, agriculture and aquaculture and financial systems’ and guide ‘food production, trade and ...”

“... sentenced to death. All this has happened with the support of the West: the US secretary of state, John Kerry, recently handed over half a billion dollars to the Sisi regime. And the situation in Syria has led some to wonder whether, compared to the jihadis, Assad might after all be the best option. The West would be more than tempted to back any suitable ...”

“... The Master), plus recentish likenesses of H.G. Wells, Byron, Woolf, Keats, Tolstoy, Conan Doyle, John Clare and others. Of these it has most in common thematically with The Master – James makes a fleeting appearance, getting Forster’s name wrong – but Galgut doesn’t seek to inhabit his subject’s inner life or to assimilate him into his own ...”

“... or more precisely of the difference between two moments: the summer of 1915, when the novel by John Buchan on which it’s based began to appear in serial form, in the middle of one world war; and the summer of 1935, when the odds on the imminent outbreak of another were shortening by the day. The film takes from the novel its title, the name of the ...”

“... unco-operative. Cereno and Bartleby, by contrast, confound their challengers with what John Updike called ‘a defensive catatonia’. But while ‘Bartleby’ unmasks the agonies of alienated labour and points to unsettling continuities between Northern and Southern workforces, ‘Benito Cereno’ never becomes a full-throated assault on chattel ...”

“... their parking lots filled with SUVs.She writes of her father’s jazz records, most importantly John Coltrane. She had a schizophrenic older brother, who teased and bullied her throughout her childhood, leading her to turn off completely, to which she attributes what others have called her remote, detached demeanour, and the need to express the feelings she ...”

“... its long depressive state – into something beautiful as opposed to correct or clever. John Cage, for some of us, is an even lesser god than Duchamp, but in the final room at Tate, where a suite of big abstracts done under Cage’s auspices is hung, it does not matter. The imperfect lusciousness of the canvases, each nearly ten feet square (the ...”

“... 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 ...”