“... the nation was brainwashed into seeing the Crystal Palace as a ‘Temple of Peace’. John Tallis, in his guidebook, observed that ‘peace was on every lip’, and not, as one would expect, the Victorian equivalent of ‘Wow!’ Jeffrey Auerbach is much occupied with charting such changes in aspiration and emphasis. His book is less concerned ...”

“... of the proto-Romantic feeling for the sublimity of nature that animates, say, Thomas Amory’s John Buncle, partly set in Bage’s own county of Derbyshire). What is significant is the author’s resolute provincialism – few if any early English novelists had a more confident indifference to London. That revolutionary ideas might develop in the new ...”

“... First, let me declare a disinterest. John Lanchester and I are both involved, in different ways, with the London Review of Books, but otherwise have nothing to do with one another. Now that’s out of the way, onto the novels. Lanchester’s first, The Debt to Pleasure (1996), begins: ‘This is not a conventional cookbook’ – a more interesting way of saying that it is an unconventional novel ...”

“... from the Stalin Peace Prize which he had won the year before was icing on a substantial cake. John Butler is a Canterbury man and an emeritus professor at the University of Kent, best known for his book The Quest for Becket’s Bones. The dean now and then compared his own struggles for truth with those of St Thomas, though the dean’s bones and indeed ...”

“... duties; and Stevenson’s competence at her job (not to mention the fact that she looked, as John Campbell notes, ‘too prim to be anything so improper as a mistress’) warded off suspicion. But the real reason this triangular relationship endured unmolested was surely that, in some crucial sense, all three principals played by the ...”

“... to the mystique. When the former army chaplain Robert Bacon visited the ‘Shakers’ God’, John Robins, in London in around 1650, he found Robins sitting on a bed before his disciples speaking in tongues: ‘But the words he spake I did not understand, only they seemed to me to be a mixture of Latin, and some other tongues (they said Hebrew) and all ...”

“... and fall of global empires’ is what exactly the author of such a work means by ‘empire’. John Darwin does not address this question directly. But we can reflect on it by asking two related questions. First, what is not empire, and is hence left out of this book? Second, what are the other terms that ‘empire’ comes paired with, in the usual ...”

“... What are yow​ worthe in goodes if all your debtes were payd?’ John Tanner was asked in 1620 when he appeared as a witness at the church court in Chichester. ‘Twenty shillings,’ he answered. He had been called by one Robert Constable to support a case for defamation against Stephen Pentecost. Pentecost’s witnesses said Tanner couldn’t be trusted: he was ‘a poore needy fellow’ with ‘a little cottage of his owne to dwell in … and noe other meanes to live ...”

“... Lisle gave Anne Boleyn a monkey in 1534, she wasn’t pleased. ‘As to touching your monkey,’ John Hussee wrote to Lisle the following year, ‘of a truth, madam, the queen loveth no such beasts nor can scarce abide the sight of them.’ What happened to the monkey isn’t clear. One hopes Anne didn’t do to it what Samuel Pepys did to his pet monkey in ...”

“... In​ 1619, for a bet, John Taylor – prolific poet, proud Londoner, waterman, prankster, anti-pollution campaigner, barman, literary celebrity, palindrome enthusiast (‘Lewd did I live, & evil I did dwel’) – sailed forty miles down the Thames to Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey in a boat made from brown paper ...”

“... and a date: 1633. This was the year a local gentleman, Sir John Reresby of Thrybergh Hall, began to note the contents of his garden. Every peach, pear and plum is catalogued, as are herbs, shrubs, bulbs – ‘Kentish Codlings’, ‘the Granado Gilliflower’, ‘Melincholly Munkes hoode’ – and attempts at grafting ...”

“... were also a frequent trigger. In the 1860s the High Church principles of Thomas Keble (brother of John Keble, a leading figure in the Tractarian movement) became unpopular in his Gloucestershire parish, producing resentment that might have exacerbated opposition to the enclosure of local common land. In 1864, a disturbing letter arrived for ...”

“... the word was with God; at the end, a passage in Revelation describes an angel appearing to St John holding an open book and instructing him to eat it: ‘it will make your stomach bitter, but it will be as sweet as honey in your mouth.’ In the 12th-century Glossa Ordinaria, the standard set of medieval biblical commentaries, some passages of the Bible ...”

“... kind about my sister … But he began to shake my arms and legs, while making a hissing noise.’ John Holms, the writer Peggy starts sleeping with in the dying days of her marriage, protects her from her husband, but only through more of the same. ‘“I’ll kill him,” he said blithely, turning on his side and tapping my nose.’The novel’s ...”

“... kind of right, so’s we can be all-those-years-ago hardfaced again. My mother’s brother, Uncle John, twenty years outbreathing her – his Seventy-Five throws shadows now that I’m her age. Much of my life his Man’s-World excluded me: the pubs, the bevvying, docks, grabs, slings, his docker’s hook slashing into cotton bales ... that khaki ...”