“... stereotypes which distorted the ‘actually existing’ Africa and Latin America he encountered. John Ryle, an anthropologist and writer who knows as much about eastern Africa as anyone in Britain, has been brutal about him: ‘Despite Kapuściński’s vigorously anti-colonialist stance, his writing about Africa is a variety of latter-day literary ...”

“... been awarded to the UK’s BAM Nuttall, Balfour Beatty and Kier Group, but also to Ireland’s John Sisk & Son, Austria’s Alpine BeMo and the Spanish firms Dragados SA and Ferrovial Agroman (a subsidiary of the infrastructure giant that owns BAA). The tunnel-boring machines have been shipped in from Germany, the rig used to nail Canary Wharf’s concrete ...”

“... The date was 24 March 1847; the place was the home of a friend on Hill Street in Hannibal, where John Clemens had taken to his bed with a cold that developed into pneumonia. It was in that room, only minutes before his father’s final rattling breaths, that young Sam for the first time watched one member of his family kiss another. His dying father ‘put ...”

“... The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Post-Socialist Change (1999) and more briefly in John Gray’s The Immortalisation Commission.* Preserving Lenin’s body from further decay is a bit like painting the Forth Bridge: every 18 months the body is bathed in a potassium acetate-glycerin solution and careful maintenance done on the accumulating skin ...”

“... will, you will live on in future people who have legitimate interests. You will live on in what John Stuart Mill called ‘the onward rush’ of humanity. It may be objected that really you’re expanding your self in this case, rather than dissolving it. But to do the former is to do the latter, given the practical human situation, and Johnston gives a ...”

“... of volumes of verse by Philip Larkin and Geoffrey Hill; there are notes on Ford Madox Ford, Saint-John Perse and many others. And above all there is a beautiful, puzzled essay on Cavafy in which Auden, who firmly believes you need to know his or her language, and perhaps even be a native speaker, to read a poet properly (‘to pass judgment on poetry written ...”

“... isn’t the first fictional character to train for a supernaturally revealed task. The hero of John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany, for instance, must master a particular basketball shot in order to fulfil his destiny by saving a group of children. It may be that the literary form best suited to dramatising forks in the road, paths taken and not ...”

“... it had published which described Jesus having sex with a variety of men, including Pontius Pilate. John Mortimer and Geoffrey Robertson appeared for the defence, but lost. Gay News was fined and its publisher given a suspended prison sentence. ‘I have an open mind about queer-bashing,’ Waugh’s diary reflected, ‘from one point of view it seems rather ...”

“... going on.’‘Debbie blinked for two minutes when she was looking after Chris,’ the filmmaker John Waters has said, ‘and Madonna stole her career.’ Which is funny, because Harry’s appearance in Waters’s Hairspray (1988), playing a monstrous stage mother with a galleon hairdo opposite a properly lovely mother, played by Divine, was to me one of her ...”

“... by Cape in 1980, and then by Penguin and Vintage, except with a new, enthusiastic introduction by John Banville and a useful short bibliography. Bowen is one of those rare writers who is equally good at novels and short stories; in fact, because her novels are short, densely written, formally deliberate, it’s not easy to particularise any difference between ...”

“... agitation against the Corn Laws in the early 1840s, the movement’s leaders, Richard Cobden and John Bright, gave encouragement to a proposal by a young Scotsman, James Wilson, to set up a weekly newspaper that would argue for the cause of free trade. But Wilson had no intention of being a mouthpiece for the Anti-Corn Law League, insisting that his paper ...”

“... press, Parliament and public for the first time since emancipation. Eyre’s critics were led by John Stuart Mill, his supporters by the likes of Carlyle and Ruskin. But the issue for Mill and liberal opinion was the legality of the punitive actions, not the source of the protest, which was the social, political and economic oppression of the majority black ...”

“... put nudes in his paintings now that he never got to see any?‘Picasso finds himself in women,’ John Berger wrote. In Gilot he found something else: balance, a degree of harmony. He started new experiments, first with ceramics at the Madoura pottery and then with sculpture, which he took to assembling out of the children’s toys or junk he’d collected on ...”

“... Chief Scientific Adviser, or the Prime Minister, or the head of the Royal Society. It is John von Radowitz, PA’s swift and industrious science correspondent. His take on GM press releases, his choice of newsworthy papers from the big weekly journals (Nature on Thursday, Science on Friday), his slant on press conferences, is seen the instant he ...”

“... Permit a personal note. I pride myself on being a professional. I’ve reviewed epic borers by John Barth and Harold Brodkey that would have broken the spirit of Cochise. Here I nearly met my match. It took every ounce of fading willpower to get through word-choked pages in The Black Veil that seemed to stare back, defying anyone to finish them, sentences ...”