“... movements and events: the Catharists, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Lollards, the Ranters, John of Leyden and the French Commune. Marcus draws these and others into his secret history of the 20th century because he is interested in revolution and apocalypse: the kind of secret history which moves not in a world elsewhere, beyond the periphery of our ...”

“... the prosecution’s documentary evidence, the unpublished papers of the US prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson, and of the principal US judge, Francis Biddle, and numerous published memoirs. Both have consulted unpublished collections of papers in the US and Britain, although in some cases not the same ones; and both regale us with titbits from interviews with ...”

“... turn sanctioned its less overt tonalities. In all versions, Housman’s secret hurt – for Moses Jackson, his unswervingly heterosexual Oxford contemporary – is all-determining. He had, Tom Stoppard wrote, ‘an unremitting, lopsided, lifelong, hopeless constancy to a decent chap who was in no need of it, temperamentally unfitted for it, and never for a ...”

“... new development: under Obama the federal government began prosecuting whistleblowers, including John Kiriakou, the CIA counterterrorism officer who spent two years in jail for exposing the Bush administration’s torture programme. Kiriakou is the sort of honourable public servant who could have become a source for Hersh. Many still exist, but in the ...”

“... 1981 expressly prohibits research into how jurors arrive at the verdicts they do. When, therefore, John Jackson complains in The Criminal Law Review that we recommend relaxation of the restriction on hearsay evidence in the absence of empirical evidence on how juries respond to hearsay evidence, my response is: yes, indeed. I only wish we did, or ...”

“... it, producing not only Rockwell, Guest and the Saturday Evening Post but also Georges Simenon, John Steinbeck and the New Yorker (‘high-class kitsch for the luxury trade’). With kitsch running wild, like the capitalism which propelled it, authenticity needed defending. For nearly fifty years, Greenberg shouldered the task, separating good art from bad ...”

“... deep feeling in flimsy Billy. The God of his fathers still mattered. Billy was as spattered as a Jackson Pollock painting, and among the main trickles was his Jewishness, with other streaks flowing toward secrecy – streaks of sexual weakness, sexual humiliation. At the same time, he had to have his name in the paper. As someone said, he had a bug-like ...”

“... the ambiguities and resorts to conventional wisdom. His list of leaders includes Harry Truman and John Kennedy – two presidents who risked war by exacerbating tensions with the Soviet Union. Dallek views FDR from the perspective of a mid-century liberal who has apparently made his peace with the warfare state. As Dallek sees him, FDR, like his cousin ...”

“... somewhat brittle voice, occasionally grated’. She was the first-born child of the Boston mayor, John Francis ‘Honey Fitz’ Fitzgerald, a ‘paunchy welterweight’ as Nasaw calls him, who belted out ‘Sweet Adeline’ at every campaign gathering and kept his daughter on a short leash. Rose returned home from convent school in 1910 to become her ...”

“... for, doubtless with an eye to their principal business, Messrs Sotheby Parke Bernet have carried John Harris’s research in a heavy and lavish volume with 419 plates – some a little grey, alas, but there are 26 good ones in colour. This may not be the first book on the subject, but it is a scholarly work of great scope and interest. As Mr Harris explains ...”

“... you prefer the Brady Bunch to the Partridge family, for instance, as Uma Thurman wants to know of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, is simultaneously a test, a cultural allusion and a send-up of the whole idea of culture. The funniest moment in Pulp Fiction concerns Harvey Keitel, come to clean up after John Travolta and ...”

“... style and equipment, perhaps by the authors of An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson, in which his picture appeared. But the faces of his naked family – father, mother, two children – have the ideal look, not so much of the Noble Savage who was a cliché in cultivated circles at the time, as of a contemporary SDP family, or the ...”

“... an ‘example of unfair burden sharing’ and ‘using a hatchet when you need a scalpel’ when John McCain proposed it during the campaign of 2008. In the same speech, Obama embraced the false analogy between federal budgets and household budgets, overlooking (for starters) the government’s control of taxation and the money supply. ‘Families across the ...”

“... In​ ‘Dream Song 364’, quite close to the end of the sequence, John Berryman’s avatar/protagonist Henry is once more being remorselessly flattered. He has surely read everything there is to read. (One thinks of Mallarmé’s opening line from ‘Brise Marine’, ‘La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres ...”

“... Laura Gottschalk in the American magazine Fugitive. Graves had entered into correspondence with John Crowe Ransom, a Fugitive contributor, some years previously, and he wrote at once expressing his admiration. Ransom cautioned Graves in his reply that Laura Riding – she had in the interim cut loose from her first husband – was ‘very fine ...”