“... in a solid black square and flourished it around the classroom as Negroes in a Cellar at Midnight. John Welch-man is fatally drawn to Allais’s parodies. He knows that he shouldn’t claim that his exhibited coloured rectangles were miraculous precursors of high abstraction, but he can’t entirely resist it. Of Allais’s 1897 sequence of single-colour ...”

“... the massive resistance of capital, labour, finance and public opinion. Unlike the Webbs, Mosley or John Strachey (in the authoritarian phase of his Coming Struggle for Power), PEP’s most outspoken planners still held to a belief in planning within an open democratic society. Yet they achieved this worthy position by evading the question of power. Power was ...”

“... Secondly, there were transcripts of conversations between Callas and the American music critic John Ardoin; and thirdly, the desolate tapes she made all alone in the last years of her life. Miss Stassinopoulos jogs doggedly through every step in Callas’s career, an exhausting business in view of the singer’s shuttlecock existence: one can’t blame her ...”

“... though some very old person today were to remember having met in childhood a person who had seen John Milton’. But we need not suppose that Lyttelton misunderstood what he was being told. Belloc, he recalls, was busy being ‘great fun’. And mere truth came a poor second to immediate effect with Belloc, whether he was setting out to entertain in company ...”

“... an escalation, even if they acquired the weapons that many in the West would like to give them? If John Griffiths’s book on Afghanistan is to be believed, the convoy major’s assessment of the Afghans contains some truth. Among the Pathans, Mr Griffiths tells us, ‘generosity and nobility of manner can yield to the most scathingly expressed form of ...”

“... as well as ancient languages, and a relentless critic of disciplinary boundaries. It’s true he took his subjects from the past, often the ancient past, but he was interested in those aspects that had special interest, or even fashionability, in his lifetime – new discoveries or dramatic revisions to previous orthodoxies. He may have been the first to ...”

“... reached a decision that President Andrew Jackson disliked, Jackson is said to have remarked: ‘John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.’) If the court’s decisions are not seen as legitimate, its power could fade.Stephen Breyer, a Supreme Court justice since 1994, is concerned that this power is under threat. In his new book, The ...”

“... Studying poetry spilled over naturally into writing it: Garfitt went to informal workshops with John Wain and Peter Levi, heard Ted Hughes read at the Poetry Society. Coghill read his poems, but wasn’t very enthusiastic; Peter Jay took a photo of him in a green silk smoking jacket looking ‘just like Rupert ...”

“... I owe my years as a jazz reporter to John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which made the British cultural establishment of the mid-1950s take notice of a music so evidently dear to the new and talented Angry Young Men. When, needing some money, I saw that Kingsley Amis wrote in the Observer on a subject about which he obviously knew no more and possibly less than I did, I called a friend at the New Statesman ...”

“... son, Nelson Bunker Hunt, made an oil fortune of his own drilling in Libya, but then Gaddafi took power and nationalised the wells. In the 1970s he funded the political evangelicals of the Bible Belt, a movement whose votes every Republican president since Reagan has depended on. John McCain is the party’s first ...”

“... literary couple exchanging enthusiasms and ideas with an effervescence that is implicitly sexual. John Dunton, a later and better known bookseller, developed this format when he founded the first literary magazine, the Athenian Mercury, in 1694. His find was a young woman from Somerset, Elizabeth Singer, who sent in poems praising King William. She was hailed ...”

“... it wasn’t under state control. It was a long time – more than two hundred years – before it took up anything like the role allocated to most central banks today: fine-tuning monetary policy to guarantee some balance in the national economy between price stability and employment. The bank was instrumental in the rise of the modern British state and its ...”

“... summoned. His lofty earlier debates on the Agony in the Garden and Cain and Abel with his friend John Colet would have remained unknown – Colet was not one to rush into print – if Erasmus had not written them up and got them into circulation. If Colet’s new St Paul’s School was known abroad, it was Erasmus’s doing. Even Jean Vitrier, coming to ...”

“... classed his enormous erudite books among the many that he refused on principle to read. John Evelyn, visiting Rome in 1644, was impressed when ‘with Dutch patience, he showed us his perpetual motions, catoptrics, magnetical experiments, models, and a thousand other crotchets and devices.’ He predicted that in a forthcoming book on obelisks ...”

“... alone most of his academic and BBC lectures from more than fifty years of teaching. To say Briggs took on too much is a laughable understatement. By the end of his life, his unfinished commitments towered over him. And yet it’s not quite right to conclude that he could never say no. His problem was wonderfully positive: he always said yes, with bursting ...”