“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was a bit (or more than a bit) of a rogue, as, variously, Greer, Ackerley, David Cornwell (a.k.a. John le Carré) and Tobias Wolff did. Ackerley’s left two letters, ‘to be read only in the case of my death’, in which he revealed his ‘secret orchard’: the mistress and three daughters he’d been hiding for many years. Ackerley’s first reaction to ...”

“... as there was to the numerical patterns that Russell Crowe’s character, the mathematician John Nash, saw in magazine articles and Dow Jones reports in A Beautiful Mind. Nash in his illness started seeing the patterns and the threats they conveyed everywhere. He had no reality check, no filter and no way of ordering priorities. Like the American ...”

“... the antecedents of Webb’s Red House in the work of Butterfield and Pugin and indeed in John Nash, who might claim, if any one architect could, to have invented the architecture Muthesius so admired. But to the Edwardians Nash was still despicable as a stucco-peddling Neoclassicist, his houses ‘cheerless’ and ‘rectangular’. It was to the ...”

“... removed from the British Empire to become a single state (doubtless under a pro-Nazi leader like John Vorster), but Germany would take Northern Rhodesia to act as a bridge between its east and west African territories. Germany would take over all of Britain’s positions in the Middle East, including its oil concessions and the Suez Canal, and also annex the ...”

“... handled the countdown with more aggression and a lot more self-importance. The selector, John Hart, on their arrival in the changing room: ‘It’s going to be a long wait, boys. Time to concentrate.’ Then the coach Brian Lochore, voice breaking with emotion: ‘You’re a good team but you’re not yet a great team. If you win today you can say ...”

“... after his early winning streak, as each new play bombed, he underwent public whippings. John Simon called Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer and Sweet Bird of Youth ‘cowardly’, and, in 1978, wrote: ‘The kindest thing to assume is that Williams died shortly after completing Sweet Bird of Youth, and that his subsequent, ever more dismal ...”

“... more mocking posture, in another century and in another country, assumed by the American president John Adams: “It will never be pretended that any person employed . . . had interviews with the gods, or was in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven.”’ Wittreich spends the rest of the paragraph glossing Adams, and then moves on. Notice how his ...”

“... remained unpublished until 1534. It caused outrage among keen Arthurians, as shown for instance by John Leland’s furious Assertio inclytissimi Arturii Regis Britanniae of 1544, in which he insisted that the whole Arthurian legend was absolutely true, listed the 149 knights of the Round Table to prove it, wrote Polydore off as a damn ...”

“... for Doris Day, the moment from which her longheld stage fright sprang. ‘This shy goddess,’ John Updike once wrote, ‘who avoids parties and live audiences, fascinates us with the amount of space we imagine between her face and her mask.’ The images of Doris Day (that blonde hair, those white teeth) and her personas as the spunky girl next door, the ...”

“... of people all at once, to a rude, barbarous and unhealthy country’. Freetown’s superintendent, John Clarkson, had plenty to keep him busy. A Royal Navy officer and ardent abolitionist (his older brother, Thomas, helped found the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade), Clarkson personally recruited the black loyalists in Nova Scotia and felt ...”

“... has little use, in his own verse, for the jazzy verbal slippages younger American poets (following John Ashbery) often pursue: his terms are never ambiguous, though they are usually polysemous and ambivalent (‘odi et amo’). He is never funny, never mellifluous, rarely delicate, and mostly unable or unwilling to copy in his own verse (however much he enjoys ...”

“... It takes a special man to resist Hilda von Einem. A German spy in John Buchan’s Greenmantle (1916), she is a ‘known man-eater’, who tries to inspire a rising of ‘Muslim hordes’ against the British Empire. ‘With her bright hair and the long exquisite oval of her face she looked like some destroying fury of a Norse legend ...”