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“... lotion and so on and on – iconic terrorist, iconic toaster, iconic Toby jug … They anticipate John Grindrod’s Weltanschauung. There is very little he sees that can’t have ‘iconic’ attached to it. As he wanders through the places created in the nearly five decades since Thatcher decreed the right to buy he finds the iconic everywhere. He sees it ...”

“... the two materials were only superficially similar. Papyrus was made by laying strips of dried reed fibres alongside and on top of one another and pressing them together. It was still produced in Egypt during the Middle Ages, but gradually edged out by parchment and paper. Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny in the mid-12th century, saw all three materials ...”

“... Truman as president and inherited the Mossadegh problem. The new administration – which included John Foster Dulles as secretary of state and his brother Allen, now director of the CIA – largely endorsed the views of the outgoing team. In a memo written at the beginning of March assessing the situation in Iran, Allen Dulles advised Eisenhower that ‘a ...”

“... Galerie 22 in Düsseldorf in November 1959. In a letter that year, he explained that Hommage à John Cage: Music for Audiotapes and Piano was composed around three ten-minute movements, each containing a number of cultural references. The first combined Duchamp, Dostoevsky and Kurt Schwitters. ‘It proves,’ he wrote, ‘that the sublime is essentially ...”

“... congressional tally of results on 6 January 2021. Here the rainmaker in Trump’s entourage was John Eastman, as it happens a former student of Lessig’s at the University of Chicago, where he was in the same class as the anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney. Eastman’s feeble argument – that Vice President Mike Pence was empowered to overturn Democratic ...”

“... of US-Soviet relations, complete with a speech by Olivia de Havilland … The next day, John Wayne learns that the Selective Service board has extended his 3-A deferment. Hot dog! The star celebrates Thanksgiving Day by carving turkeys at the canteen, even as Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin meet in Tehran to plan the US invasion of Europe. The ...”

“... type of lordly self-belief, nor with the obsessive thirst for fame that motivated a poet like John Berryman. His literary career is often compared pityingly with their astute professionalism, as if, authentic poète maudit though he was, he never quite got the marketing right. Certainly he never managed to create out of his sufferings the suspense of a ...”

“... indeed I have just heard from the clarinettist’s owner, the Los Angeles collector and inventor John Gaughan, that the android’s performance was not quite what it seemed, though it was nonetheless impressive. His instrument was sealed at both ends and air was blown into it not through his mouth but through his thumb. Each of the 32 keys controlled a brass ...”

“... of Desert Island Discs’ ten best episodes. Many included Yoko Ono on being hated and witnessing John Lennon’s murder, the actor Stephen Graham on his suicide attempt, Maya Angelou on childhood trauma, Simon Cowell boasting, Alfred Wainwright on his last walk in the Lakes as his eyes failed (‘the mountains wept for me that day’) and Tom Hanks moved to ...”

“... question of standards. In the course of describing how Daphne’s youthful relationship with Carol Reed came to an end, Margaret Forster quotes a poem on the not uncommon theme of separation, ‘when one heart flies / And the other is left in the empty hell of remembering.’ It had been found among du Maurier’s papers after her death. Her biographer is ...”

“... like the universities but has evinced no other signs of wanting to endanger the status quo. John Prescott appears a broken reed – but could benefit from the spending review. Margaret Beckett, the minister most responsible for Parliamentary reform, has been an almost complete failure. The David Blunkett of Sheffield ...”

“... are alleged to belong to the ancient Sabean sect whose worshippers give primacy as a prophet to John the Baptist. Depending on the nature of what they are asked to do, I’m told, witches and sorcerers charge at least $400 for a spell or a curse, though the better-known ones can command up to $6000. Spells relate to marriage, love, divorce, good health, job ...”

“... a cross-country driver of legendary finesse and a military-trained marksman. He had been at Reed College in Portland with Snyder and Philip Whalen, a formidable Pacific Rim triumvirate of youthful poets and seekers. Heavily dosed on Gertrude Stein, and fired up by a chance encounter with William Carlos Williams, Welch was confirmed in his destiny as an ...”

“... cheer to the rafters each time Germany scored a goal. 8 June. Spot the typo, spare the blush. John Vincent writes from the University of Bristol: ‘In your memorable diaries you quote Disraeli’s view of May 1881, a month after his death. Would that other historians had access to such primary sources!’ 14 June. Alan Bennett’s letter to the LRB about ...”

“... devotees to complain that Americans have got him all wrong. As early as 1897, the radical John Jay Chapman presented him as a fellow iconoclast who had been miscast as an apologist for American selfishness, ‘embalmed in amber by the very forces he braved’. The tendency of biographers to make their own Emersons means that some academics dislike the ...”