“... represented a headache for Charles Stewart Parnell. History was Daniel O’Connell, Parnell and John Redmond, who led the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster after Parnell. My grandfather had been interned after the 1916 Rising, and sometimes when the older generation in my family gathered they talked about the Fenians and evictions, Black and Tan ...”

“... The first letter​ – five lines written to his father in April 1943 when John McGahern was eight years old – could take an entire book to gloss:Dear Daddy,        Thanks very much for the pictures. I had great fun reading them. Come to see us soon. We got two goats. Uncle Pat does not like them. Will you bring over my bicycle please and games ...”

“... be disappointed. Born in 1882, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was the first surviving child of John and May Joyce, whose recent marriage had been fiercely opposed by both sets of parents. Their first baby, named after his father, had died at barely two months. The first healthy son was crucial affirmation for the marriage and, although 13 further births ...”

“... country … The silence, I find, is a factor which has enabled the evil to spread.’ Likewise John Gordon, in the Sunday Express, who seized on John Gielgud’s arrest for importuning in 1953 as a chance to rip aside the ‘protective veil’ of delicacy around this ‘repulsive’ and ‘peculiarly ...”

“... a lot of writers. He has a chapter on Blackheath (and Greenwich) poets, including Cecil Day Lewis, John Pudney and G. Rostrevor Hamilton, as well as his close friend Julian Symons, the dedicatee of this book, and the poet’s poet son, John Fuller. There are some sympathetic pages about another neighbour, Bonamy Dobrée. But ...”

“... on this book for several years; the task of completing it from his notes was carried out by John McDowell. (The first two chapters and the introduction were rewritten by Evans himself in the last months of his life.) Evans’s death at such an early age is a tragedy. We can have no real idea what his mature years might have brought forth, and this book ...”

“... of being flung together in a hurry by an author who has not digested her considerable researches. John Braithwaite, on the other hand, presents a thorough and deeply-considered criminologist’s view of law and society. Sensibly, he treats the terms ‘lower class’ and ‘middle class’ as denoting nothing more precise than persons relatively low or high ...”

“... an approach that she calls the ‘new natural theology’. It is represented by writers like John Polkinghorne and John Haught, who seek to show that the facts revealed by contemporary science leave ‘room’ for a providential deity. The image of potential competition for ‘ontological space’ between science and ...”

“... asks towards the end of the novel. ‘Nowadays it all feels like repetition.’ At this point in John Banville’s distinguished career it’s hard to ignore a sense that old ground is being worked over, again and again. It’s a safe bet that a new Banville novel will feature a male narrator, in late middle age, isolated, reliably unreliable, absorbed in ...”

“... where the bus would be stopped the next day) and shot the three brothers who lived there: John, Brian and Anthony Reavey. (John and Brian died immediately; Anthony died a month later.) Twenty minutes later gunmen entered a house in Ballydougan and shot and killed Joseph O’Dowd and his nephews Barry and Declan, all ...”

“... an advantage not generally enjoyed by today’s Muslim minorities. Two of my paternal uncles, John and Robert, were blond and blue-eyed. John, in fact, was deployed after war service to the British Mandate force in Palestine. In uniform, he went into a Jewish-owned shop, and the shopkeeper said to a customer to whom she ...”

“... trim on the outside, feigning the sense of proportion that the contents had no time for. John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance was a proper doorstop, and so was L.H. Myers’s The Near and the Far, which I read in New Orleans in 1980, mainly in a hippyish French Quarter teahouse called Until Waiting Fills (a line from Robert Heinlein’s ...”

“... John Maynard Keynes, grandson of the minister of the Bunyan chapel at Bedford, was born into a religious tradition that for two hundred years had stopped its ears against the blandishments of Mr Worldly Wiseman and sought only the Celestial City of Eternal Life. The City was to be found, as all readers of Pilgrim’s Progress knew, not by piety or public-spiritedness or good works or moral behaviour, but by that indefinable state of inner consciousness known as Salvation by Faith ...”

“... to an uncommon lover: ‘In the beginning was you, Word. I new it.’Like Philip the Handsome, John Dee identified with his biblical counterpart. ‘I am John,’ he says, the John who began his gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was ...”