“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... will take its place alongside Gladstone’s diaries, the letters of Carlyle and Disraeli, and John Stuart Mill’s collected works as an indispensable resource for understanding the Victorians. With the possible exception of Adam Smith, there can be few economic gurus who have been so vulnerable to sustained political hijacking by left and right. From the ...”

“... gathered on Blackheath, entering London the next day. Joined by many from the city, they sacked John of Gaunt’s palace of the Savoy and forced the king, the 14-year-old Richard II, to meet them at Mile End. There, on 14 June, Richard made major concessions, the most important being the abolition of villeinage. While negotiations were going on at Mile ...”

“... them. ‘The monastery of Evesham was suppressed by King Henry VIII … at evensong time,’ John of Alcester recorded, ‘the convent being in the choir at this verse Deposuit potentes, and would not suffer them to make an end.’ Four years into the dissolution, there were few wealthy abbeys left to seize; the very last was Waltham Abbey, on 23 March ...”

“... young in 1985. Robin Birkenhead’s draft extended to the end of 1940. It had been shown to Sir John Colville, who was asked to finish the story. He declined, but wrote an epilogue giving his own view of the Churchill he had known. He died suddenly in October 1987, having just completed the Foreword to the book now published. Robin Birkenhead had never ...”

“... Salvidge and Sir Thomas White. Even Labour followed the example thus set, in the person of John Braddock, a founder member of the Communist Party who lapsed into respectability. Perhaps one should include his wife Bessie in the list. Equally special was the composition of the Liverpool electorate in its changing form. Religion, or, as Waller’s title ...”