“... seemed to understand it, as it were, from the outside. When one of the Martians, the mathematician John von Neumann, was appointed to the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study at the age of 29, a story went around that he was ‘a demigod but had made a thorough, detailed study of human beings and could imitate them perfectly’. In Britain and America, the ...”

“... in mutton grease’. Few things give greater pause for thought to the amnesiac ex-commando in John Lodwick’s ambitiously daft Peal of Ordnance (1947) than the state of the box from which he rings the BBC to tell them he has planted a bomb in one of their studios. The booth smelt of urine and spittle gouts. He opened the directory; obsolete, tatty and ...”

“... who look at life through the telescopic lens of a rifle, and that was the model for him, much as John Wayne was once a model for boys who thought cowboys put decency back into the world. On 20 July 2012, James Holmes, after dyeing his hair a kind of purple, went to a midnight screening of the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises at the Century movie theatre in ...”

“... Ivy League, ‘egg-headed, homosexual, left-leaning financiers’, as the Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy described them, unfit for the rough and tumble real world? The new rich despised the rules that bound entrepreneurs in the name of social security. They detested the welfare state, which, as they saw it, only coddled the lazy and the losers. They ...”

“... Blair’s call for the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees to be rewritten, and John Townend’s complaint about the ‘mongrelisation’ of Britain.) Balfour warned Parliament that the Jews ‘remained a people apart, and not merely held a religion differing from the vast majority of their fellow countrymen, but only intermarried among ...”

“... or Iggy Pop’s The Idiot? Kraftwerk have a track called ‘Numbers’, but I prefer Soft Cell’s John Rechy-inspired single of the same name, one of the great lost 45s of the 1980s, which involves an entirely other (and far less hygienic) form of accounting. And I haven’t even mentioned that other great pre-techno German dance classic, ‘I Feel Love’ by ...”

“... on a world at war’, Thompson shares space with some of her friends and rivals, particularly John Gunther, H.R. Knickerbocker and Vincent Sheean. Cohen is more interested in the personal lives of her subjects than in anything they wrote, an emphasis I found frustrating, even as I admired the stylishness of Cohen’s own writing. The broken ...”

“... came fully fitted with the miserable wife, brattish children and off-the-peg infidelities of a Joseph Heller novel that was yet to be written. The creed of excellence has a sun-bleached Californian feel, but it is also tuned into the spiritual tradition of ‘Let my people go.’ Excellence replaces the measured outputs of the coerced and managed ...”

“... military establishment and the new government in Washington, a town presided over by another John/Jack the lad. Profumo’s go-getting reputation and unstuffy demeanour made him attractive to the men around JFK, who liked that he didn’t seem like a typical Brit, never mind a typical Tory. He was extremely sociable, and well suited to the work ...”

“... and looking just like paint thinner or gasoline.And then there’s the aerial footage taken by John Wathen, or Hurricane Creekkeeper, that’s gone viral on YouTube, Facebook, other facets of the internet, and the media, including CNN. It shows great plumes of smoke rising from the sea, as the oil is burned off the surface. The flames are invisible but the ...”

“... impersonal, or terrorising. The unconscious is sociable, even convivial. ‘The good news,’ Joseph Smith and William Kerrigan write in their commentary on Rorty’s essay, ‘is that what goes on out of awareness can also be one’s ally.’ The ‘also’ here is doing all the work. Whether or not there is something novel in Freud’s view of the ...”

“... he turned to Classics or Mathematics. At school, the largely Tory boys – it was the Mafeking and Joseph Chamberlain’s stumping the country – did not like a professed Free Trader. It would appear that his own parents did not much care for him either. It is said that they farmed him out to live with an aunt, one of these sad Edwardian ...”

“... nothing but authenticate. Not only does she presume to scrutinise his dealings with the unsavoury Joseph Duveen – a partnership which began in 1907 and continued for thirty years – but she also attempts (a little clumsily) to check the durability of his attributions and to relate them to his interest in sales. This is to go trampling blithely over rows of ...”

“... state; from which it follows that the discourse of that Church – Gibbon’s critics (other than Joseph Priestley) were nearly all Anglican clergy – must be taken seriously, as argument from known premises dealing with problems known to arise from those premises. It may further follow that chapters 15 and 16 of the Decline and Fall can be considered as ...”

“... inspired by the mystical sense of universal fraternity he had absorbed from the Unitarian Joseph Priestley and the dissenting circles he had moved in at Cambridge; Southey’s, on the other hand, was bookish, a heady and incoherent mix of Gibbon and Rousseau and Voltaire, stirred up with the modish radicalism of Godwin – none of which Coleridge ever ...”