“... of us don’t know what to look for, however, and the aerial view is alien to our sense of scale. John Wise, the pioneering American aeronaut, thought he was looking at a waterfall in a pleasure-garden when he saw Niagara Falls from space. ‘I was disappointed, for my mind had been bent on a soliloquy on Niagara’s raging grandeur … The little frothy ...”

“... John Maltby​ , the studio potter and sculptor, used to say that you can’t make a teapot about your father’s death. Grayson Perry’s whole career assumes the opposite, that you can express any amount of personal and social comment through traditional forms of craft, not just pottery but tapestry and textile design: the Tate sells a printed silk headscarf of his that wouldn’t look out of place in a county town on market day, but represents contemporary art as a sort of board game, with arrival at the Bankside holy of holies (above the cheeky caption ‘Tat Moderne’) the winner’s reward ...”

“... hundred-page documents entirely blacked out. The government makes regular threats to curb FOI but major legislative rollback has, so far, been kept at bay. The system remains free to access and easy to use: requests can be made by email, letter, phone or social media. Most attempts to rein in the scope of the original act have foundered: in 2007, the Tory MP ...”

“... prevailing over steel tanks and Israeli-made loitering munitions blowing up rusty 1960s Howitzers. John Antal, a retired US army colonel and military analyst, called it ‘the first war in history won primarily by robotic systems’. It’s true that Armenia’s Soviet-era air defence systems were no match for Turkish-built drones and other imported military ...”

“... places to buy its sacraments and phylacteries; bumper stickers, for example, saying ‘Jane Fonda: John Kerry with Tits’. Phyllis Schlafly and Tom Wolfe have both described the memorial wall as a ‘monument to Jane Fonda’. A set of urban legends has sprung up around her visit to Hanoi in the summer of 1972: a prisoner of war, ordered by his captors to ...”

“... comfort, but a lot of it very attractive. I came to the reviews with no expert knowledge of what John Sutherland calls ‘the fiction industry’ and ‘the reviewing establishment’. His two excellent books, Fiction and the Fiction Industry (1978) and the recently published Best-Sellers *, have helped me greatly.Other People was published on 5 ...”

“... had gout and was just going to have to put up with it. The third of Hogarth’s ‘undertakers’, John ‘Chevalier’ Taylor (1703-72), seems to have been an evident crook, who boasted of his success at seducing patients, talked what he called the ‘true Ciceronian’ (i.e. always ending every period with a verb), may have been the death of Bach and ...”

“... scholarly opinion differs as to its degree of condescension. Robeson took the title role in three major productions – London in 1930, New York in 1942 and Stratford in 1959 – playing it as the noble Moor tragically (or perhaps ‘pathetically’ would be more accurate) betrayed by his inability to perceive the nastier side of human nature. The result (at ...”

“... Byzantine frontality, is to be characterised by a phrase, I would single out a remark made by John Cage as he went round the exhibition, that he was struck by ‘the absence of tranquillity in a centred composition’. The late paintings seem to me to be divisible into three phases of unequal length – a head, a body and a short tail. The first phase ...”

“... one of the new breed of ruthless mercenaries emerging in the later 14th century, men like Sir John Hawkwood, the leader of the legendary White Company, whose monument can still be seen in the Duomo in Florence next to Dante’s, who hired themselves out to petty tyrants and brought terror and destruction wherever they went. Moreover, Jones ...”

“... of Aden’ as if this supposed act of perfidy could be taken in isolation, and as if it made any major difference to the affairs of the Gulf: the account sets the tone of Curzonite rancour divorced from historical reality that runs through much of the book. He alleges but never demonstrates that there was a causal link between Britain’s withdrawal from the ...”

“... placed in the Fellows’ Garden at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he is commemorated beside John Milton. There is occasion to take a look at them, nonetheless, for we now have this account of the man by his brother, Philip Snow. ‘Brothers seldom write about each other,’ as the publisher says, and one may think that in general they are wise not to do ...”

“... the lovable Godfrey of Dad’s Army, so that it is horrid to imagine what a beastly sergeant-major might say to him: ‘Well, well, what have we here? Is it a Womble? Is it Winnie-the-Pooh?’ In fact, Russell was always treated with loving care by the lower ranks, who found no fault in him. There is another picture of Russell looking rather tragic in a ...”

“... novels and six volumes of collected short stories, he is an industrious translator of the likes of John Irving, Raymond Carver, Tim O’Brien and Scott Fitzgerald. Once the owner of a jazz bar who only had time to write in the small hours, he is now such a cult figure that there are even translations of his novels, complete with Japanese notes, aimed ...”

“... back in a tradition descending from 17th-century Anabaptists and Ranters, of Ezra and Isaiah, of John Bunyan, of the New Jerusalem, of watchwords from the walls of Zion, of ancient prophecies, of the Whore of Babylon and the Beast, of the Land of Beulah, of blood on the walls of palaces, lambs entangled in thorns, and of ‘the old vail of the law, under ...”