“... and most of the characters wear fedoras, as if they’ve wandered in from a William Wyler or John Huston film. The sets, too, ‘bear witness to my passion for the American cinema’, Melville said. The phone booth in the métro is an American one; the bar resembles a coffee shop in Manhattan; the police interrogation room, with its Venetian blinds, is ...”

“... work of MFA graduates and/or instructors), divided into three main groups: ‘technomodernism’ (John Barth, Thomas Pynchon), ‘high cultural pluralism’ (Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros) and ‘lower-middle-class modernism’ (Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates), with Venn diagrams illustrating the overlap between these groups, and their polarisation by ...”

“... quality – a little like Weegee’s – at once random and composed. In one, the circus director John Ringling North dominates the right half of the frame, shouting instructions to an unseen person, while above and to the left a high-wire act has two showgirls suspended from the wheels of a bicycle: the picture frame is divided by a balancing bar carried by ...”

“... length – in sum, unlike anything in the rest of European literature.’ As early as 1917, Joseph Conrad was complaining of ‘public indifference’ to Turgenev’s works. Eliot, writing in the same year, mourned that Turgenev was the ‘least exploited of Russian novelists’. He hasn’t lacked champions, starting with Conrad and Eliot, and ...”

“... Steering Group that included . . . Alexander Haig Jr, Max Kampelman, Anthony Lake, Samuel Lewis, Joseph Lieberman, Paul Wolfowitz and Mortimer Zuckerman’. Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s Deputy Secretary of Defense, is, along with Perle, best known as an architect of the regime change in Iraq. (‘Regime destruction’ may be a more accurate term.) The report ...”

“... of Madras – was in some ways a flight from bad times at home. Their Glaswegian father John’s business putting up electric party illuminations in the gardens of the West London gentry never recovered from the blackouts after the zeppelin raids, and the financial help the family got from his wife’s father, a one-time miner turned wealthy ...”

“... after crossing the border into Syria. In January 2014, despairing at the lack of progress, John Brennan, the director of the CIA, summoned American and Sunni Arab intelligence chiefs from throughout the Middle East to a secret meeting in Washington, with the aim of persuading Saudi Arabia to stop supporting extremist fighters in Syria. ‘The Saudis ...”

“... little effect, nonetheless bear repeating. The greenhouse effect was first hypothesised in 1824 by Joseph Fourier – 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 ...”

“... the Colonial Secretary from the Governor, a tough and (with the settlers) unpopular Ulsterman, Sir Joseph Byrne, which seems to have put Charnwood’s mind at rest. On the one hand, Byrne said that ‘illegalities of this nature are unreservedly condemned by this Government.’ On the other, the Governor conceded that arbitrary corporal punishment as an ...”

“... poor and ‘already a bit queer’ woman called Betty Francken-Schwabe, who had been a pupil of Joseph Joachim, for whom Brahms wrote his Violin Concerto in D major. Her serious career came to an end when Hitler’s purges of Jewish musicians forced her into exile. Cramer writes of his gratitude for ‘all the beauty which, under her guidance, I learned to ...”

“... breakthrough and millstone it belongs with Catch-22 (1961) and Slaughterhouse Five (1969). Joseph Heller didn’t publish another novel until 1974, while Vonnegut kept to his established rhythm, producing one every two or three years. Roth stepped up the pace, with Our Gang appearing in 1971, followed in successive years by The Breast, The Great ...”

“... and 3000 of the rapidly produced 1860 second edition – books offered for sale by the publisher John Murray at the same time included 7600 copies of an account of the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin and 3200 copies of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help. From 1860 to 1865, the monthly sales of ‘the book that made the modern ...”

“... Machiavelli, Vico, Herder, Pluralism, Romanticism, Utopianism. Even the longest piece, on Joseph de Maistre, is the enlargement of a portrait already sketched in an earlier comparison with Tolstoy. In a sense, however, this is the interest of the collection: it serves to bring the unity of Berlin’s thought sharply into focus. A philosopher by ...”

“... were awaited with interest. Since it opened to the public in 1985, the Saatchi collection in St John’s Wood has become a focus of what’s called the contemporary art debate. With every purchase, names are made and names are called. But Saatchi’s taste, his collecting policy, is eclectic and elusive. So much art, of so many kinds, has passed into and ...”

“... a work co-authored by two pillars of the foreign policy establishment of the time, Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane, whose first edition – it went through many – appeared in 1977. Though presented as a system of norms and expectations that helped assure continuity between different administrations in Washington by introducing ‘greater ...”