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“... Mary Patterson, married Lewis Sheridan Leary in 1858. The following year, Leary was recruited by John Brown for his suicidal raid on Harpers Ferry, and the bullet-riddled shawl that was eventually returned to Mary was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next ...”

“... City, and heads to where the main body of Royal Marines is. It is grey and cold. One Whitehall guy has flown in from Qatar with the Hoon party in a pink shirt and shiny black loafers. He is freezing. The Marines are lined up for inspection with a selection of weaponry. Hoon is late so the minders let us mingle with them. Could the great secret which the PR ...”

“... jargon. Krotkov was also an author who wrote several anti-American plays including one called John, Soldier of Peace, based on the life of Paul Robeson. While Pasternak worked, this strangely-assorted group would sit up smoking and playing till dawn. Hingley is detached, dry, basically unforthcoming: de Mallac enters into the legend with warmth and ...”

“... befriending and then covering up on behalf of the Democratic politician and presidential hopeful John Edwards takes the genre of enabler’s revenge to a whole new level. ‘Covering up’ doesn’t really do justice to Young’s role, which by the end included going on the run with Edwards’s mistress Rielle Hunter and their love-child (with Young’s own ...”

“... Powerlessness, his 1980 study of quiescence and rebellion among Appalachian ‘mountaineers’, John Gaventa noted that where ‘a positive self-image is not portrayed for a particular group, that group may develop a sense of inadequacy about itself, reinforced by how other groups project their media stereotypes on them’ – and he isn’t talking about ...”

“... Studying poetry spilled over naturally into writing it: Garfitt went to informal workshops with John Wain and Peter Levi, heard Ted Hughes read at the Poetry Society. Coghill read his poems, but wasn’t very enthusiastic; Peter Jay took a photo of him in a green silk smoking jacket looking ‘just like Rupert Brooke!’; he talked about jazz with Robert ...”

“... the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. ‘The Circus’, it’s worth recalling, is what John Le Carré called his fictional spy headquarters.And then​ there was Peter Sichel, a German Jew from a family who had lost their wine business to the Nazis. He had escaped to Bordeaux and, after France fell, to the US via Spain. Aged nineteen, he enlisted ...”

“... hearings, serves on the National Security Council; Reagan’s national security adviser John Poindexter until recently headed the Pentagon’s new counterterrorism unit; John Negroponte, former ambassador to Honduras, is now ambassador to the UN. Jeanne Kirkpatrick is on the board of the International Republican ...”

“... be said that the volumes under review offer much aid to understanding what was happening inside John Lennon’s mind. Of those people who should not attempt to write biographies of Lennon, Ray Coleman heads the list. A trade editor who might as well have been writing about agricultural machinery as music, he embodies everything Lennon had to fight: social ...”

“... about the screen-mediation of reality. In his philosophic commonplace book Straw Dogs (2002), John Gray propounded a new theory of consciousness: ‘In evolutionary prehistory consciousness emerged as a side-effect of language. Today it is a by-product of the media.’ Cronenberg is one of a burgeoning group of artists who are attempting to describe what ...”

“... called the Angry Brigade, the language of whose communiqués (identified by a stamp made from a John Bull printing set) led the Met Bomb Squad to Ian Purdie and Jake Prescott (the former a left-wing activist, previously convicted for throwing a petrol bomb at the Ulster Office during a demonstration; the latter a drug-user and small-time criminal who’d ...”

“... the tense problem of the modern muse and the sexual prompt of modern art’, or that John Updike is largely concerned with ‘the revelation of form, the moment of aesthetic revelation in the contingencies of life’. Bradbury is just going through the motions, hastening from name to name, reciting worn-out academic phrases, too bored even to ...”

“... heroes outwit von Stumm and Hilda von Einem as they did in Greenmantle. Giles Railton, the hero of John Gardner’s novel, is a scion of the landed gentry and works in the mysterious upper reaches of the Foreign Office. There he recruits his offspring and nephews and nieces into the ranks of the secret service, just in time for the First World War. But all ...”

“... with Kushner’s idea for a column explaining the ins and outs of local small businesses: ‘A guy with a hot dog stand – he’s a businessman, I’m a businessman. Tell me how his business works!’ We managed to scotch that one. I wrote a weekly humour column, and once targeted Christie rather viciously. I was told Jared liked that one. But he never ...”

“... Cheered on by the Tory faithful, John Major recently dismissed as ‘claptrap’ a letter signed by 500 university teachers of English attacking the proposed revisions to the National Curriculum. The academics were accused – falsely, I believe – of wanting to undermine the teaching of Shakespeare. A few months earlier, the Education Secretary John Patten sent back an official report on English in schools with the comment that 15-year-olds perhaps ought to be made to study the ‘great tradition of the novel ...”