“... the best room in an overbooked hotel. In Poland for the papal visit in 1991, he’s so moved by John Paul II’s demeanour, conducting a six-hour open-air ceremony, that he seems to get close to re-conversion. ‘There was something about the singing, the colours and the beauty of the words which reminded me of strange, hard-won moments of pure contentment ...”

“... It is a formidable test, and although the sun often goes in behind his prose, Kortian meets it. John Thompson also reaches back and does so to reach forward again. He goes back not to Kant or Fichte or Hegel or Marx but back, and a little sideways, to Wittgenstein: Wittgenstein the genitor of the view that an analysis of the rules of language use defines ...”

“... put political cartoons on the map. The print-makers of the 1760s had a field-day with a heroic John Wilkes (‘Wilkes and Liberty’) and with Lord Bute as Public Enemy Number One (no fewer than four hundred anti-Bute satires appeared, mainly sporting a jackboot and a petticoat inscribed ‘no petticoat government’, in reference to Bute’s alleged ...”

“... knowingness and flamboyance you have to come right up to the present and the stories of John Morrow, in which the native idiom and capacity for non-serious outrage find their fullest expression. All these afford no more than glimpses, if compelling ones; as yet, no Honorary Consul, Golden Notebook or Burger’s Daughter has come out of Belfast. As a ...”

“... was packed with the finest instruments of the day, made by Jesse Ramsden, Thomas Earnshaw, John Bird, John Dollund and John Shelton. Cook would have shared the satisfaction of these artisans that their hands could make instruments calibrated to one four-thousandth of an inch. Cook ...”

“... now, when they are so far behind in the opinion polls, they propose to recover by transforming John Major into a Europhobic John Bull. The other key to Conservative success was organisation. As Parliamentary reform acts expanded the electorate, the Conservatives recruited a mass membership in the constituencies. These ...”

“... praising it to the skies (and then grounding a few objections), I need to declare an interest. John Lennard says in his acknowledgments that he is in debt to me. Nothing like as much as I (and many others to come) now stand in debt to him, but his IOU had better be spelt out. First, that in some measure he took off from a 1978 essay of mine on Geoffrey ...”

“... Williams), only two (named) amateurs have been deemed worthy of representation in the show: John White Abbott, the remarkably faithful imitator of his teacher Francis Towne, and the Reverend William Gilpin, who merits such exceptional treatment solely on account of his work as a leading theorist of the picturesque (in fact, Gilpin didn’t produce ...”

“... anticlerical French model, was misguided rather than vicious. This distinction was confirmed by John Robison, professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh, in Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe (1797). British Masonry stood in a different relationship to the visible Establishment. Whereas in 1738 Pope Clement XII’s ...”

“... picture of the sorts of punishment meted out to new recruits by midshipmen:The Mids, as oft as John drew nearTo stare about him, seemed to sneer,For John as soon as e’er they saw,They knew was but a ‘Johnny Raw’.As Johnny sleeps on deck, his mattress is ‘lugged clean from under him’ by a neatly thrown fish-hook ...”

“... tongue that lacks numerals (even ‘one’) and cannot or will not formulate such recursions as John’s brother’s house (allegedly, too, it lacks sentence-embedding, although it often achieves the same results through verbal suffixes), and Riau Indonesian, in which the lack of grammatical markers and the flexibility of word order reportedly allow both ...”

“... of Fox into a strong coalition government; instead, he formed a weak, untalented administration John Ehrman’s final volume deals with the years from 1797 to Pitt’s death early in 1806. His biography is on a scale which might be called ‘Victorian’ except that most of the great biographies of Victorian politicians appeared in this century. According ...”

“... detest what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ Actually, as John Durham Peters points out in Courting the Abyss, there is no evidence that Voltaire ever said any such thing. An English writer, Beatrice Hall, writing under a male pseudonym in 1906, suggested that Voltaire’s attitude to the burning of a book written by ...”

“... he was lucky to miss), he was taken into the royal council of King Philip VI. With the next king, John II, who ascended the French throne in 1350, he came to be on very close terms. He was one of the Knights of the Order of the Star, founded by John in 1352 and which that king hoped would revive French chivalry after its ...”

“... Tall, silver-haired and bearded, with a mesmerising voice and beguiling manner of delivery, John Pocock has long struck me as the Gandalf of the historical profession. The range, altitude and stylistic sophistication of his writing seem almost other-worldly, though legend has it that his distinctive accent derives from a small community of Channel Islanders in New Zealand ...”