“... to worry about.’ Wright devotes much of the latter part of The Looming Tower to the story of John O’Neill, the senior FBI agent who saw the danger of bin Laden early, wanted to arrest him and put him on trial when colleagues in the CIA would have preferred simply to kill him, and who died in the World Trade Center when it was attacked in 2001. As late ...”

“... is also a vast outpouring of Bach recordings, which, until DGG curtailed the series, included John Eliot Gardiner’s amazing cantata performances. One of these took place every week for a year all over Europe and North America – the intention was to match the composer’s own Sunday series for the churches he served as choirmaster and organist. Yet ...”

“... clique until 1657, when it, too, began selling shares, not in individual voyages, but in John Company itself, by which time its Dutch rival was by far the biggest commercial enterprise the world had known.Dutch capitalism got off to a flying start. Amsterdam was Europe’s wealthiest trading city, Dutch wages the highest in the world. Amsterdam’s ...”

“... it is never who the stout man is, just one of his enduring, and maybe endearing, properties. John Stuart Mill, the progenitor of the doctrine of natural kinds, left us a good way to distinguish the two. Giving horse and phosphorus as examples, he argued that there are endless characteristics associated with some classifications; thus horses (and ...”

“... speak, under their feet. But it is hard not to speculate about what might have been different had John Smith lived to become prime minister in Blair’s stead. Whether you approve of it or not, Blair’s success in outflanking the traditional party of the right from within the traditional party of the left was achieved with remarkable rhetorical and political ...”

“... work of an obscure photographer she had discovered in Paris (Atget), Ralph Steiner, Paul Grotz, John Cheever, Ben Shahn and, most important of all, Lincoln Kirstein.Evans always acknowledged the role luck played in his life, and nothing could have been luckier than the friendship he formed with Kirstein, whose influence on his career was so profound that ...”

“... It may, for example, be instructive for clinicians and Freud readers alike to discover, as John Reddick writes in his translator’s preface to the Penguin Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, that if the opening paragraph of Strachey’s translation of On Narcissism were handed in by a student as a translation exercise it would end up ...”

“... with another dog, Emily waded in at once while ‘several other animals,’ the Haworth stationer John Greenwood reported, ‘who thought themselves men, were standing looking on like cowards as they were.’ She forced the dogs apart, ‘dredg[ing] well their noses with pepper’ and sent them packing. When Branwell drunkenly set light to his ...”

“... then again begin,With tremulous cadence slow, and bringThe eternal note of sadness in.That is what John Masefield called ODTAA, an acronym for ‘one damn thing after another’, and the title of his 1926 novel, which really does what it says on the tin. It’s a long tale of futile adventures in the jungle, ‘event after event’, as Masefield says, which ...”

“... hostility to the Community. She was still strong enough to ensure that her favoured successor, John Major, took over, but it soon became clear that he had no more intention than Lawson or Howe of hewing to her vision of Europe. With scarcely over a year in office behind him, Major signed the Treaty of Maastricht, after negotiating an opt-out from the ...”

“... He wasn’t able to give any further details of the incident. The solicitor for the defendants, John Turner, puts the blame on the investigating team: ‘Evidence that tended to disprove what had happened was pushed to one side, evidence that seemed to fit was gleefully seized on. And every time there was a negative, it was twisted. Normally, if there’s ...”

“... punishment in the United States subsists – inescapably – in a miasma of race. The Honorable John H. Land in 1977 presided over the trial of a black man called William Brooks, whose case McFeely follows. Land is the son of a prominent local dignitary who had seen to the lynching of an adolescent boy 65 years earlier. The barefoot ‘little black ...”

“... some of the best contemporary poets and translators such as Alastair Reid, Richard Wilbur and John Hollander. He also worked with Borges on translating his prose works into English, and coaxed him into producing new stories and a long autobiographical piece for the New Yorker. All of this is vividly described in The Lesson of the Master: On Borges and His ...”

“... realist? His engagement with the Communist Party – he had been a leader of the Chicago John Reed Club, the CPUSA writers’ group, and published journalism in The New Masses – contributed, but Wright’s relationship with the party had always been stormy, particularly when it came to aesthetics. His 1937 manifesto, ‘Blueprint for Negro ...”

“... unoccupied for more than two minutes they would inevitably bugger each other. I share with Sir John Betjeman the fate of having been educated at a public school so steeped in the Arnold tradition that, when we were there, water closets were doorless: but perhaps the Laureate was exaggerating when, later in life, he said that he did not have a bowel ...”