“... defender of the Bosnian cause, or at least its dedicated mourner. He has written a polemic against John Major’s Government and David Owen, the EU mediator in the remains of Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995, for their connivance in the ferocious dismantling of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He is keen on Major’s New Labour successors, and confident that Tony Blair’s ...”

“... annual stipend so he could concentrate on his poetry, only to commit suicide two years later; to John Quinn, a lawyer and collector to whom T.S. Eliot gave the manuscript of The Waste Land; to James Laughlin, founder and editor of New Directions (or Nude Erections as Pound liked to call it); to Alice Corbin Henderson of Poetry; to Scofield Thayer and James ...”

“... to the ‘kitchen sink’ allegedly installed somewhere in the house. Novels by Stan Barstow, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey and others framed stories told from the point of view of an aspiring and/or truculent working-class protagonist, often Northern, usually but not always male, as a Bildungsroman or novel of moral and sentimental ...”

“... example, author, with her husband, of My Boy Jack? The Search for Kipling’s Only Son (1998). (John Kipling died in his first half-hour in action – at the age of 18 – at Loos in 1915. Though his stricken father carried on a 20-year search for his grave, his remains were not found until 1992.) When not writing, the Holts run a sprightly operation known ...”

“... Hania (right) On Monday, 12 June, Rania and Naseem went to the Sainsbury’s by the canal at the north end of Ladbroke Grove. They went from there to the Westway Centre off Portobello Road; that was where Rania took English classes (she had the best attendance) and she was due to graduate that day so they went there and met up with their friend Muna ...”

“... had acquaintances in the literary world (her correspondents included H.G. Wells, Bryher, H.D. and John Cowper Powys), most of her life was lived in obscurity, and her friendships were mainly epistolary ones. Her aversion to having her picture taken and her reluctance to submit to interviews (she believed that readers should ‘keep their illusions’ about ...”

“... seems marvellous, when all the countries surrounding Africa are so forward in comparison,’ John Speke, discoverer of the source of the White Nile, observed. Very much a man of his time, Speke was necessarily less aware than we are today of the diversity of African societies, their extraordinary artistic wealth, and the antiquity of their trade with the ...”

“... difficulty of keeping one’s hat in place while performing the nine prostrations of the kowtow. John Bell, a Scottish doctor attached to a Russian embassy c.1720, didn’t enjoy the way sheep were cooked, but was fascinated by the acrobats and jugglers. He reckoned that Russia was the only nation with a fair chance of conquering China, though there ...”

“... In the movie, however, it provides the occasion for one of Hollywood’s happy endings, in which John Quincy Adams moves the Supreme Court to a recognition of human rights by eloquently invoking the Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately, this never happened. The justices did, indeed, send the Africans home, but their decision turned on maritime law and ...”

“... Victorian Minds, presented a throng of thinkers, in a celebration of cerebration. And her study of John Stuart Mill suggested that different states of mind might dwell within the same body. The result of this approach is a rich and unusual brand of intellectual history: more interested in the typical and representative second-rate figure than the transcendent ...”

“... after his father had succeeded in wasting most of the family estates (around Cromarty, in the north of Scotland), and presumably because of this, Sir Thomas and his younger brother imprisoned their father in an upper room for five days. When the father gained his freedom he instituted legal proceedings, but nothing much came of them, and eventually all ...”

“... the City Government and the New York Police were doing something right. It is easy to forget that John Lindsay, still burdened with one of the most harshly negative public reputations among American political figures, was hailed in 1968 as the politician of the future, the man who had kept the city cool and who offered hope that the liberal experiment for the ...”

“... Spanish American literature, finally to reach the enormous audiences they deserve. Already, John Fowles in a Guardian essay has used the Chronicle to great effect as a prism through which to see the battle for the Malvinas. No doubt the Sun will shortly advise its readers to do the same. No doubt Sandy Woodward is a fan of the tale of Colonel Aureliano ...”

“... pioneer works as S.E. Rasmussen’s astonishingly innovative London: The Unique City (1934) and John Summerson’s now-classic Georgian London (1945). So influential have these books become that, in retrospect, their novelty and audacity are hard to appreciate. But at the time of publication, they were milestones in the history of architecture, showing how ...”

“... like Bolivia or Paraguay. De Gaulle said that Chile was ‘the pilot country of Latin America’. John Gunther wrote in 1967 that Chile was ‘one of the most civilised countries in the world’, and that the general line of government was ‘roughly that of the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt or even the British Labour Party’. There is not a hint of such ...”