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“... A little over thirty years ago, John Ashbery delivered a lecture at the Yale Art School called ‘The Invisible Avant-Garde’, in which he asked whether the distinction between the avant-garde and the mainstream has become obsolete. ‘Looking back only as far as the beginning of this century,’ he remarked, ‘we see that the period of neglect for an avant-garde artist has shrunk for each generation ...”

“... The poet who pretends to read John Austin’s essay on ‘Pretending’ Need never grasp its condescending Point that pretending can’t succeed. Thus the weak-minded, headstrong youth Private returns to his unending Wording of fables, still pretending Not to pretend to tell the truth ...”

“... John Major’s vision of Britain is history by now: a unitary state north and south of the Tweed, secured by consent, subject to one monarch and funded by a non-tartan tax system. When Major first published his views, however, in the punningly titled Historia Maioris Britanniae (1521), his innovativeness upset fellow Scots ...”

“... In 1964, Time published a profile of John Cheever which, in a sub-heading, described him as ‘The Monogamist’. Subsequent events have proved that not to have been the fact-checkers’ finest hour. In 1984, two years after his death, Susan Cheever published Home before Dark, a memoir which portrayed her father, whose public image was that of an impeccably upper-middle-class monogamist suburban WASP, as a promiscuously bisexual alcoholic ...”

“... midcult territory that he does, somewhere between literary respectability and bestsellerdom: John O’Hara, Nelson Algren, James Jones, John Hersey. Parini declares in a fighting Afterword that answers to the Steinbeck question ‘spring to mind’. Clearly the answer which springs highest and most persistently is ...”

“... masterpiece of ‘Seaton’s Aunt’. The process works another way, too. In his splendid stories John Updike creates a far more telling image of himself as a denizen of suburban America, and a participator in its ritual matings and partings, than if he had spelt it all out in the true first person, recounting his triumphs and disasters in the field of sex ...”

“... Guards in the Great War. He was shaken and humbled, as the British Empire was to be. When his son John, aged barely 17, was rejected by the Navy because of poor eyesight, he wanted to go off and enlist in the ranks, but his father used his friendship with Lord Roberts to get him a commission in the Irish Guards. He disappeared the following year in the Battle ...”

“... am, little chum. Sorry about the vegetables. Stones’ll be pretty with that. What do you want, John? Informally, a new body, and an assistant. I’ll bet the place is swarming with printers. I wrote them yesterday. Really reached out, plugnutty. Like the noiseless farts of antiquity squeamishness is best, yet ...”

“... of Surgeons hangs the portrait by Joshua Reynolds of the 18th-century surgeon and anatomist John Hunter. It has been much darkened by the bitumen content of Reynolds’s paint, and restoration work in the Fifties has not been able to prevent the fading into the surrounding gloom of many of its supporting details. Only Hunter’s face, once bathed in ...”

“... surprised in we can’t guess what macabre rite of love. Whether or not this shot helped inspire John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire one doesn’t know; Irving, author of The World according to Garp, already had his own surreal interest in bears, as in his early novel Setting Free the Bears. At all events, a girl who wears all day (and night) a shaggy ...”

“... John le Carré has patiently established himself over the last twenty-five years as the discriminating reader’s favourite thriller writer. The BBC’s adaptations of the George Smiley trilogy in 1979 and 1982 made him almost overnight a popular author on the Ian Fleming scale, and it can have done no harm that the TV version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy coincided with the Blunt scandal ...”

“... claim to be remembered for his efforts in securing democracy, freedom of speech and fairness was John Wilkes, the subject of Arthur Cash’s informative and enjoyable new biography. Now that ‘high politics’ is taught less and less in schools and universities, Wilkes’s great political achievements, which included lowering the tone of high politics, are ...”

“... the political elite. Blair’s fluency was sufficiently striking to make me wonder whether, when John Prescott eventually lumbered into view, he hadn’t been elevated against all the odds into high office simply in order to enhance his leader’s elocutionary merits by some desperate and close-to-home contrast. But the effect of Blair’s delivery when what ...”

“... Tieck, who coined the phrase ‘romantic irony’ for the artistic apprehension of human duality; John Paul Richter, who invented the term ‘doppelgänger’; Schlegel, for whom, as for Coleridge, Shakespeare was a Proteus, and who wrote that dualism ‘is rooted so deeply in our consciousness that even when we are, or at least think ourselves, alone, we ...”

“... the lover (who has, significantly, no credit on the title page). Spencer’s letters to and from John Tasker, an Australian with whom he was involved between 1957 and 1959, when they were both in their mid-twenties, are not, as love letters go, especially interesting. There are routine endearments, doubts, quarrels, expressions of physical desire and gossip ...”