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“... in Reich’s work its ideological justification, and he once referred to himself as Reich’s ‘John the Baptist’. His many books are littered with references to Reich’s concepts of ‘character armour’ and ‘self-regulation’. Reich, in turn, saw Neill’s project as a practical test of his ideas, and he sent his own son to Summerhill for a ...”

“... nasty-tasting substance that gets put in household chemicals to stop children from drinking them. John Fletcher MacFarlan was an Edinburgh apothecary who started making laudanum in the early 19th century. T&H Smith moved its flourishing morphine works from the Canongate to Gorgie a century later, and went on to supply both painkillers and sterile dressings to ...”

“... a year as Literary Editor for the Nation, doing so well at matching books and reviewers that John Crowe Ransom said he deserved a Pulitzer Prize for it. ‘Not since Poe had an American poet laid down the law in quite such a carnival spirit.’ In those days of talented amateurs the Eng Lit business was still the Gay Science. Used by Nietzsche, and as a ...”

“... and are especially active, like the Surrealists, on the beaches. Tony Cragg, recently awarded the Turner Prize, made his name with relief murals composed of ‘beach-worn ship-refuse, plastic bottles, lids, frisbees, old toys, plastic milk crates’. For Waldemar Januszczak these were didactic – ‘one of the things they were about was the indisposability ...”

“... of Wyoming promptly labelled Arnett an Iraqi ‘sympathiser’. The criticism even extended to Ted Turner, who was labelled ‘Baghdad Ted’, an appropriate consort for ‘Hanoi Jane’. Military and political leaders were instantly dispatched to the major television talk shows to provide spin control with euphemisms about ‘collateral damage’ and (in the ...”

“... I begin to write about John Martin: Apocalypse (at Tate Britain until 15 January) before looking at the pictures. Maybe, I say to myself, if I set memories of Martin’s pictures against the words in the catalogue (Tate, £19.99), if I learn what he achieved in more than a century and a half of (variable) success, I’ll find that we owe his memory some kind of apology ...”

“... the mis-spellings and pointed out that ‘Doctor Livingstone, I presume?’ was not uttered by one John Rowlands Stanley. A full-page picture shows Edward, Prince of Wales, at a sporting event with his jacket buttoned the wrong way, the photograph having been reversed; another full-page picture of a French singer has suffered the same treatment. Thus do the ...”

“... he be required to remove his trousers. Lowe, it turns out, was a sergeant-major in the war, and John Le Mesurier, who played the limp Sergeant Wilson, was a captain. Now Lowe was playing a bank manager who had come up the hard way, and Le Mesurier, his chief clerk, was a pampered ex-public schoolboy, incapable of giving orders (‘Oh, Wilson! Bark it ...”

“... on any aspirations.’ Ayers shared the platform with the English writer and discharged convict John Barker, formerly of the Angry Brigade: ‘I see my particular past either slagged off or romanticised, both of which I find distasteful.’ Spiotta’s novel does, in some ways, present the suffering of the 1960s as a package; it also romanticises its ...”

“... and loses a few; the last story finds Bech back where he started. The general narrative is no page-turner, as Bech would say. But the various episodes are, in themselves, very funny. Updike provides a hilariously sour account of the travails of middling, and superlative, American literary success. In his partial eclipse, Bech ‘supported himself by appearing ...”

“... in a besetting sin shared with Alec, and with certain other famous Scots before them: the John Knox syndrome. There is always a most unnecessary sermon, forced into the mouth of one of the characters, and belonging there about as well as salt cod in a goldfish bowl. (In this novel, it is Elspeth’s impassioned little homily on Scottish ...”

“... Last autumn, at the award ceremony of the 1994 Turner Prize, Charles Saatchi took the podium at the Tate Gallery. It was a very rare public appearance by Britain’s leading private collector of contemporary art. His words were awaited with interest. Since it opened to the public in 1985, the Saatchi collection in St John’s Wood has become a focus of what’s called the contemporary art debate ...”

“... and drifted into the writing of guidebooks for the expanding railway age. His first publisher was John Murray the third, who wanted an anonymous Handbook on Berks, Bucks and Oxfordshire and insisted on facts, not fancies. Hare regretfully accepted this limitation. Much of his early travelling was done with Maria, by now a prey to hysterical trances. When he ...”

“... Guccione in 1983, that she found her voice, and perhaps, her ease with burning bridges. Sir John Junor, who had been editing the Sunday Express for thirty years when I joined, maintained that you could not be sued for libel if you framed something as a question … Thus I could ask my old boss … if he was connected with the Mafia, and put the question ...”

“... in Oberkampf in the 1990s, and in his photography book and in his jazz book, and in the one about John Berger he did in 1986, as he was starting out. He writes, often, about romance and glamour and pleasure and excitement. Even more, he writes about listlessness and ambivalence and prevarication, the digressions and distractions that seem to stop him getting ...”