“... the impact of Deconstruction in the United States. It does not engage in technical debate as John Ellis or Thomas Pavel have done, and is not an academic but a ‘journalistic’ book: journalistic in an honourable sense, which will doubtless not be immune from the sanctimonious sneers of the high priests of the de Man cult, who freely use journalism to ...”

“... Some of the contents of the King’s mad speech I cribbed from contemporary sources, such as John Haslam’s Illustrations of Madness, an account of James Tilly Matthews, a patient in Bethlem Hospital in 1810. Other features of the King’s mad talk, his elaborate circumlocutions (a chair ‘an article for sitting in’), for instance, are characteristic ...”

“... Watson calls attention to the statement, in the biography of the politician by Namier and John Brooke, that Townshend needed his wit to shield a poverty of heart. This might be held to be like Lovelace, and in each case the wit is very brilliant. Each is a paragon in this respect. And Townshend was also known for his easy success with women. In ...”

“... of his uncle being a farm-labourer, or the blighted life of the intelligent, radical cobbler John Antell who married into the family. Instead, Hardy exaggerates the scale of the Rockhampton cottage where he was born, his father’s status in the social scale (he attributes his comparative lack of success in the building business to his being by nature ...”

“... that is, they are as solid as furniture and without any touch of camp. A more recent novel, John Updike’s The Coup, performs a rather similar feat, moving back, as it were, in time via geography: a ‘developing’ African country bristles with ideas, mainly in the head of its hero, a Western-educated native dictator who finishes, still reflective, in ...”

“... the former exploit the latter even though both parties gain from exchange. Also, the reference to John Rawls is misleading. His statement in A Theory of Justice that ‘a departure from the institutions of equal liberty ... cannot be justified or compensated for by greater social or economic advantage,’ was explicitly made within the context of ideal ...”

“... murder and atrocious cruelty were European monopolies. A look into Aztec or Mayan history, or into John Roscoe’s early 20th-century history of the Buganda kingdom, will correct any such error. What seems to have been a specially European capacity, from the early medieval period, was the resort to instant, frantic aggression as ‘shock and awe’ to break an ...”

“... though his analogy was the bell jar rather than the greenhouse – and proved experimentally by John Tyndall in 1859. In the 19th century it could be seen as unambiguously a good thing: if carbon dioxide and other trace gases didn’t trap heat in the atmosphere, the earth wouldn’t be warm enough to support life as we know it. But there is now far more ...”

“... new poem, and gave the poet a genial thumbs-up. Some years later Hughes told another variation to John Carey, to which he added some Jungian grace notes, and the probably too uncanny touch that the visitor was Hughes himself with a vulpine head. In Poet and Critic, an interesting edition of Hughes’s correspondence with Keith Sagar, we have yet another ...”

“... family-owned business empires in Asia. You wouldn’t know this from the sober demeanour of John Riady, Mochtar’s grandson. Still in his twenties, he was prepared for membership of the global business elite at Georgetown, Wharton and Columbia, but returned to teach law at his family’s university in Lippo Village. I met him in his office, which was ...”

“... and comical vividness is the hallmark of Audenian experience, which occurs within situations, as John Bayley once charmingly put it, ‘which we can imagine occurring to the poet as he closes his eyes for a liberating instant between two minutes of actual living’. The poem plays with the idea of knowing things and conveys the feeling of being puzzled by ...”

“... the case with Alzheimer’s that illness uncovers truth, it seems both to Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley (‘Puss’), and to her biographer, Peter Conradi, that it did so here. In their view Murdoch’s advancing illness, crumbling away language and reason, laid bare in her an essential impulse toward love. As words broke up, it was the vocabulary of ...”

“... to spend as mandated, would be spent on counter-insurgency warfare directed by US commanders and John Negroponte from the new US embassy in Baghdad. First, $3 billion was diverted from the budgets to restore Iraq’s destroyed electricity supply, water supply and sewers to security and law enforcement. The reduced electricity budget (down from $5.6 billion ...”

“... Andrewes, for example, he can break in on his own prose and say, ‘I was writing last week on John Dos Passos,’ and then go on to make a comparison between the two authors’ respective forms of revulsion from industrial society. Describing himself as ‘a concision fetishist’, Wilson recommended that the literary journalist should steer a path ...”

“... At one dinner party of New Age contributors, Mansfield – who was going by Yékaterina – met John Middleton Murry, an Oxford student who was starting up an art and literary magazine of his own, Rhythm. He was already her fan: ‘In a German Pension seemed to express, with a power I envied, my own revulsion from life,’ he would write in his ...”