“... summoned. His lofty earlier debates on the Agony in the Garden and Cain and Abel with his friend John Colet would have remained unknown – Colet was not one to rush into print – if Erasmus had not written them up and got them into circulation. If Colet’s new St Paul’s School was known abroad, it was Erasmus’s doing. Even Jean Vitrier, coming to ...”

“... she is discharged and sent home, she takes to her bed and refuses to speak. Only the arrival of John, her ex-lover, who is himself dying from a degenerative disease, can rouse her from this trance. Getting ill in one’s forties, for Schaeffer, is a form of memento mori. In the hospital, Iris ‘was forced to ask herself what meaning her life had, and if it ...”

“... Item: in 1684, there appeared John Oldham’s posthumous Remains in Verse and Prose, with a prefatory elegy by John Dryden, ‘Farewell, too little and too lately known’. Dryden’s poem has been much admired and praised – but not by Claude Rawson, who calls it variously ‘pompous’, ‘self-serving’, ‘overrated’, ‘unctuously self-exalting’, ‘self-promoting’, ‘pontifical’ and ‘patronising’ Item: in a chapter on Richardson (wittily called ‘Richardson, alas’ after ‘Hugo, hélas’), Rawson quotes a curious letter in which the novelist asks a friend to come to Tunbridge Wells, where she will be able to see a figure more ‘grotesque’ even than Beau Nash or Colley Cibber, ‘a sly sinner, creeping along the very edges of the walks, getting behind benches ...”

“... stylistic exercise, like that of a very clever student who had been nourished on a forced diet of John Cleveland, George Barker (The Dead Seagull) and Craig Raine, and who had once heard the plot of a novel by Iris Murdoch. The novel’s characters were indeed Romantic, if by that one means fabulous, fanciful, whimsical, high-flown, etc, as under Roget ...”

“... Ballin, compiled 54 ornately-bound volumes of diaries, which his son eventually entrusted to John Vincent for editing ‘That Lord Crawford was a man of distinction was agreed by all,’ attests Vincent, who seems unduly impressed by royal letters of condolence. Nevertheless, Vincent admits to finding it slightly difficult ‘to convey something of his ...”

“... Network’ – men like William Whewell, Adam Sedgwick, Charles Babbage, George Airy, John Herschel and John Henslow. Some half-dozen pieces on the Cambridge Apostles, not the oldest but certainly the longest-lived of student secret societies, have made readers familiar with a whole generation of ...”

“... Silas Lapham down to Dreiser’s Frank Cowperwood (of The Financier and The Titan) and John O’Hara’s Alfred Eaton (From the Terrace), have been studied in their native habitat. The question is: why has fiction in this vein been commonly ignored by academic formulators of the tradition in American literature? Or why, to come down to ...”

“... that the Americans were bombing cities. They were not.’ The ingratiating, bonding Norman St John-Stevas found much to agree with in the Leader of the Opposition’s condemnation of terrorism, while assuring him that ‘if the Prime Minister had been advised by those who know much more about the legality of these matters than I or the Leader of the ...”

“... was found there the next day. After the suicide, Alison’s relationship with her schoolboy son John became closer and then too close: ‘one’, Denis Judd says, ‘of extraordinary, clinging love’. She interfered with his first engagement, and when he eventually married she fell foul (how could she help it?) of his wife, who believed that ‘...”

“... and Lawrence Urdang move from one dictionary house to another. Oxford (with R.W. Burchfield and John Sykes) is comparatively stable. When work began on the new Collins, Paul Procter and Della Summers were young conductors under impresario Urdang, and they later moved on to make dictionaries for Longman. Patrick Hanks was recruited to complete the Collins ...”

“... though he brings these two things together. It’s not only that a packet of biscuits suggests John Buchan’s Hannay. The older tradition is acknowledged to the point of parody when the Prime Minister’s private secretary is given a family set of rooms in Albany where, ‘coming in off the chilly stone staircase, Maxim and Agnes had walked through a time ...”

“... disposition of his breast’, in reply to a defence against More’s retort to an earlier tract by John Frith. Frith was only a late intervener in a battle that had been joined since 1528, in which year More, chartered by his old friend Cuthbert Tunstal, who was also his bishop, had begun to read and to refute the ‘pestilent books’ of Luther’s English ...”

“... of, and delight in, realms of the highest creative thought. If only one could say the same about John Cage! The quality of his achievement is still in dispute, and there are some who would doubt that he has contributed anything of substance to the music of his time – which, however, is not to say that he has contributed nothing. A kind of Diogenes or ...”

“... his memory in laudatory poems and improving books for the young. But it was not to last. When John Morley published his massive official biography in 1881, agricultural depression and industrial decline were beginning to erode the appeal of free trade in Britain. Morley’s book became both a vindication and an exercise in tact, and Cobden the ...”

“... it, as Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, and the arrival in 1605 of a man with a mission: John White, known to posterity as the ‘patriarch of Dorchester’. All Christians should live according to Christ’s teachings, lay up treasure in Heaven and follow God rather than man. Evidence of their doing so is less than universal. Yet sometimes we find ...”