“... fervour also seems to me to come into play in the contrast between his distaste for John Ford and his love of Howard Hawks, perhaps the perfect no-brow. The clue to Hawks’s greatness is that this sombre lining is cut against the cloth of the genre in which he is operating. Far from the meek purveyor of Hollywood forms, he always chose to turn ...”

“... seen. Not a few of the characters the boom brought with it were larger than life too: ex-Governor John Connally of Texas, for example, still scarred from the Kennedy shooting, hustling for oil companies and on the way down to the bankruptcy that broke him, and T. Boone Pickens, the greenmail king, so thrilled with his acquisition of the Mesa field (which he ...”

“... Geertz’s classic The Religion of Java with On the Subject of ‘Java’, recently published by John Pemberton, perhaps the most gifted of Geertz’s disciplinary grandsons. (Pemberton studied under Geertz’s Chicago-era pupil James Siegel, author of the brilliantly Derridian ethnography of Java, Solo in the New Order.) The Religion of Java strikes one ...”

“... di People’s Election Special rolling off a thirty-year-old Heidelberg printing machine at the John Love Press, a small works where the centre-spread of an eight-page edition was already flouncing onto the delivery table. (This little engine-room of populist exasperation was another non-Kaplan place.) Paul Kamara, one of the paper’s editors, drove down a ...”

“... Indo-European linguistics and Ernest Gellner’s essay on Bronislaw Malinowski; then back to John Anderson – the 1938 editor of Tacitus – as a prelude to the vital (yet en passant) observation that ‘the history of modern ethnology is inseparable from that of nationalism’; and so to Franz Boas, antiquarianism, assorted reflections on L’Esprit ...”

“... and desires cannot be unconnected to his disease. Nor can we look at the blood flowing from John the Baptist’s head without remembering the blood which Beardsley constantly coughed up from his lungs. His jilted Pierrot is racked with remorse, always about to spit up blood, taking to his curtained bed, already at death’s door. Early in 1913 Yeats ...”

“... king. Coincidentally, Shapiro quotes from a popular postwar textbook, The Plantagenets, in which John Hooper Harvey states that the Jews engaged in a series of ‘most sinister crimes committed against Christian children, including murder (allegedly ritual) and forcible circumcision’. Harvey’s prejudices must have helped shape his interest in the ...”

“... Ingmar Bergman, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Giacometti, Graves, Isherwood, Heard, Huxley, St-John Perse, Gilbert Ryle, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Edith Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh. Some, including Eliot and Huxley, are evoked at length; others come to rest in a marvellous single image. Edith Sitwell’s eyes are ‘heavily underpencilled in blue, like the woad ...”

“... and an important element in some Modernist and Post-Modernist perspectives. The philosopher John Searle’s battle for the rediscovery of the mind aims to place the fact of the experiencing ‘I’ once again at the centre of our vision. One of the many paradoxes to which Sass directs our attention is that, as our sense of ourselves has become more and ...”

“... themselves, or to priests or nurses, while the heroic surgeon sawed on. Half a century ago, John Alfred Ryle, the founder of social medicine, declared that one of the mistakes of scientific medicine was to have shelved the problem of pain. With both clinical and humane ends in mind, he called for fresh study. Since then things have indeed improved, but ...”

“... command a stable majority for integration. The appearance of outside visitors, most notably Pope John Paul in late 1989, gave the East Timorese the sense that they had not been forgotten by the outside world, and increasingly they found opportunities to communicate with it. For the first time they began to organise demonstrations for ...”

“... affected to some degree, and looked for an explanation. ‘She called out to the country,’ Elton John sang at the funeral. But may it not have been the English Rose’s country which, in the aftermath of loss, ceased being able to call out in a traditional way? If so, a call long responded to – not really ‘down the ages’ but for quite a long ...”

“... or the bizarre hysterically whipping up into nightmare and nonsense (as in his description of John Lennon’s decline: ‘bed-ins, bag-ins, be-ins, in-ins’). But the effect of his often brilliant verbal delirium is to make things wordy and unreal, language warding off the experience it describes, whisking it away. So Hoolihan implausibly combines the ...”

“... that a fair number of Gould’s contemporaries-Vladimir Horowitz, Gary Grafman, Leon Fleisher, John Ogdon, to mention a few of the most gifted – succumbed to mysterious illnesses and had to curtail appearances and whole careers. The extremity of being out there alone, day after day, sooner or later catches up with one, especially if, as in Gould’s ...”

“... searching for the kindness of strangers on Clapham Common. The Director-General of the BBC, Sir John Birt, was knighted by Tony Blair and worked with and befriended Mandelson at London Weekend Television in the early Eighties. LWT executives became millionaires when a share option lottery in 1993 fell well for them. (Among the lucky LWT ...”