“... for many years in the Good Food Guide in spite of a correspondent’s happy description: ‘Mr Johnson is in the bar, and by the end of the evening the bar is in Mr Johnson.’ Even more successful as a machine à habiter is the suburban station occupied by the music critic of the Irish Times, who enjoys a mile or two of ...”

“... their living room in New York: Edmund Wilson, James Thurber, Walker Evans, James M. Cain, Nunnally Johnson, S.J. Perelman, Dawn Powell, Joseph Mitchell and John O’Hara. Many of these celebrated figures, artists and authors approaching fifty at the start of the decade or only lately past it, grew up in small provincial towns, emigrated to New York in the Jazz ...”

“... wrote about her included Ian Gilmour, W.G. Runciman, Neal Ascherson, Christopher Hitchens, R.W. Johnson, Ross McKibbin, E.P. Thompson, Tam Dalyell and Peter Clarke. What they wrote seemed excellent to me, with Runciman bearing the palm for aphoristic conciseness. In embarking on a review, also in 1989, of Hugo Young’s biography of her, R.W. ...”

“... of a Polish Pope. The presence of the Chicago-born Cardinal Markinkus as the close confidant of Paul VI from 1964, and as President of the Vatican Bank since 1971, has also encouraged those who wish the Papacy to be active in these parts of the world. It could well be that the stories of millions of dollars being smuggled to South America, or destined to ...”

“... Academy was a grudging discretion. Ten years was deemed a decent enough interval in the case of Paul Morand, for example, whose ‘role during the last war’ led to the defeat of his candidacy in 1958: in 1968 he was duly elected to the Academy. The Academy’s refusal of all attempts at reform and renewal has not done it much good: today it is seen by ...”

“... of the National Nuclear Security Administration from May 2003 to January 2007, told Rhodes that Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary for defense, had once explained to him why no one in the administration was interested in arms control. He said it was because arms control was the sort of thing you can’t get when it would help, and when you can get ...”

“... reveals him as, in a sense, exemplary of the spirit of his age: the age of Samuel Johnson, burying himself under mountainous literary tasks such as editing Shakespeare and compiling a dictionary in order to stave off the terrible prospect of ‘vacancy’; of Hogarth, whose frenetically busy engravings ‘fill up the void in the mind’, in ...”

“... Western governments; close relations with the foreign media; and a unique relationship with John Paul II, whose third Papal visit to his native country in June 1987 was the occasion for a sustained defence of human rights, and a plea for Solidarity’s legalisation. By the time the Round Table process began earlier this year, Walesa was a powerful man. In ...”

“... lurking in dark corners, and now everybody’s writing about her. Since the rediscovery of B.S. Johnson (if that’s what it was) that followed Jonathan Coe’s biography a few years ago there’s been a wave of enthusiasm for ‘experimental fiction’. A new crop of writers such as Claire-Louise Bennett, Kevin Davey, Will Eaves, Eimear McBride and Eley ...”

“... Varo, Benjamin Péret, Leonora Carrington, Gordon Onslow-Ford and his wife, the writer Jacqueline Johnson, who became a close friend to whom Rahon dedicated a few poems. Her last collection, Noir Animal, appeared in 1941, although she did contribute some work to Dyn, the journal founded by Paalen, which appeared for two years during the war.She began to paint ...”

“... into two main camps. On the one hand, the Behaviourists and ‘eliminative materialists’ such as Paul and Patricia Churchland propose to throw intentionality out along with other alleged myths of folk psychology. They believe there are no beliefs. Or, as Dennett more tactfully remarks: ‘the theory they, um, espouse or champion has no room in its ontology ...”

“... and dull in the experimental novel Coe turns into entertainment. He is writing a biography of B.S. Johnson – whom he admires – but he writes more like Pamela Hansford Johnson. He has established for himself a set of stylistic conventions – conversational smooth prose, non-sequential narrative, the use of interpolated ...”

“... The poet​ Linton Kwesi Johnson calls the first two generations of Caribbean people in postwar Britain the ‘heroic’ generation and the ‘rebel’ generation. The Windrush generation, who arrived between 1948 and 1962, when the Commonwealth Immigrants Act came into force, were ‘heroes’ who, though not politically passive, were forced to cultivate resilience in the face of violence and hostility ...”

“... literature. Josipovici contrasts the attitude to death expounded by Plato and yearned for by St Paul. They welcomed it, as the abandonment of the uselessly material, but for the Greeks death brings sadness and pain. In a wonderful reading of the Biblical stories of David, and of Esau and Jacob, Josipovici rightly emphasises the theological restraint ...”

“... piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’ – has anyone else between Powell in 1968 and Boris Johnson in 2002 used the word ‘piccaninnies’? And what was it Johnson said about women in burkas? ‘It is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letterboxes.’ Coincidental no doubt ...”