“... anniversary of a school that one of Luther’s followers wrested away from the monastery of St John in 1529 and renamed the Johanneum. Great figures of the German Enlightenment had taught or studied there; C.P.E. Bach and Telemann had been music masters during the 18th century. All this is to make clear that my image of my father before I knew him is of a ...”

“... as those middling public figures who were also important to the history of Tudor literature: John Heywood, Sir Thomas Elyot, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, ‘writers who in one way or another tried to come to terms with the experience of writing under a despotic monarch’. Walker’s strength is that he understands and engages intimately with the ...”

“... with proper games. In Stryker’s Run, for example, you controlled a character called Commander John Stryker, who had to convey an urgent top-secret message from one futuristic army base to another. What this meant, in practice, was running along past a monotonous scrolling backdrop of uniform mountains, shooting any enemy soldiers you encountered along the ...”

“... that such a tag would seem appropriate to describe any other poet of the 20th century. Why her? John Ashbery’s praise for Bishop as a ‘writer’s writer’s writer’, whose work ‘inspires in writers of every sort’ an ‘extraordinarily intense loyalty’, seems apt. And Ashbery knew that to say such a thing might be to pay ‘an ambiguous ...”

“... of Ceres’ womb, that her reaper-lovers had got upon her – to suit their double-columned books. John Barleycorn must die a second death, when bankers rule, as Spengler shows, till Caesar comes. Jones’s skills have not exactly deserted him: there is still the historical knowledge, the talent for allusion and association, and some distinctive ...”

“... American writing that have flourished and endured. Wolff sidestepped Postmodern elders such as John Barth, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, William Gass, Harry Mathews, Paul Metcalf, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick and Paul West, as well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None ...”

“... ruin of 20th-century literature, Ezra Pound’s Cantos.’ There is a remarkable brief piece on John Huston’s film The Misfits, and the tone changes entirely for two writers who clearly matter a great deal to Coetzee: Beckett and Celan. This is how we learn of ‘the distinctive prose that Beckett, using French models in the main, though with Jonathan ...”

“... individual psalms have been put, the detailed Christian exegeses of everyone from St Augustine to John Donne (and only very rarely the Jewish exegeses of Rashi and Avraham ibn Ezra), or even – except where there are specific references – other passages in the Bible. (This is contrary to Jewish tradition, which tends to pile up citations and defer to the ...”

“... was incarcerated in an asylum though never charged with the murders. Other Jewish suspects were John Pizer, a shoemaker known as ‘Leather Apron’; Severin Klosowski alias George Chapman; Michael Ostrog, described by a police investigator as ‘a mad Russian doctor and convict, and unquestionably a homicidal maniac’; and Joseph Isaacs. A few brief ...”

“... Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth, the younger, Richard of York, was taken to St John’s Abbey in Colchester, where he worked as a bricklayer. The book is almost as extraordinary a production as the story it tells. It is garnished with the usual scholarly apparatus of notes and bibliography, and much of the time pursues apparently rational ...”

“... marginally inconvenienced,’ and, in a brief conclusion deploring anachronism, he notes that ‘John Paul II even apologised to victims of the crusades.’ Amid the din of crusade historiography, Tyerman’s voice is distinctive and consistent. His natural take is detached, sometimes ironic, sometimes sympathetic. He intends his ‘Western European ...”

“... to see into the experiences of those around him, an oafish Thackeray, and Dickens’s biographer John Forster, who SHOUTS IN CAPITALS, as well as George Cruikshank the angry cartoonist.Male novelists, however, are peripheral to The Fraud. At its centre is the strange case of the Tichborne Claimant, which dominated the news and the popular imagination through ...”

“... of 1949 was designed to challenge the ‘false doctrines’ of communism in the Third World. John F. Kennedy set up the US Agency for International Aid in 1961 and in 1971 USAID was joined by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (which was absorbed into the Development Finance Corporation in 2019). In the eye of this hurricane of acronyms, two ...”

“... being central to any of the novels’ plots as they unfold.Val McDermid has called Herron ‘the John le Carré of our generation’ (a phrase plastered on all the paperback covers) and Herron acknowledged the debt, long before she said that, in the first Slough House book, Slow Horses (2010): one of the characters was given ‘le Carré’s collected ...”

“... white supremacy. After losing the gubernatorial election of 1958 to the even more racist John Patterson, Wallace vowed never to allow himself to be outdone in playing the race card. He was elected governor in 1962, for the first of four terms. ‘Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,’ he proclaimed in his inaugural ...”