“... Sir Thomas is buried in St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, a church that survived both of London’s major conflagrations only to be severely damaged in the 1990s by IRA bombs. But the Greshams’ legacy – Britain’s global wealth and the city’s primacy in international finance – remains visible and vital. The greatest alteration in London’s fortunes ...”

“... rights, who befriended mice as well as cats, but who cherished his old dog, the Reverend Doctor John Langborn; Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her spaniel Flush, immortalised by pet-lover Virginia Woolf; and so on. The significant point is that, more often than not, pets help humans to acquire ‘sympathetic tendencies’, as Locke insisted, and here the ...”

“... who purchased 13-year-old girls for £5 in order to expose alleged wrong-doing (London, 1885 – John Pilger was using the same technique for the Daily Mirror in 1982); barons who lived on giant soundproof yachts (Pulitzer in 1907, Scripps in the 1920s); barons who helped start wars and stirred up riots; barons who drank a gallon of whisky every day and beat ...”

“... with a computer and a copy of Gibson’s book.Neuromancer was the first novel to win all three major science fiction awards, and according to Bruce Sterling, cyberpunk’s main polemicist, it sent the entire genre ‘lurching from its cave into the bright sunlight of the modern zeitgeist’. Although Gibson has collaborated on an alternative Victorian ...”

“... Vasari coined the name ‘Fra Angelico’ a hundred years later. In 1982, he was beatified by Pope John Paul II, which is why Italian audiences now call him Beato Angelico – not just angelic, but blessed.With more than 140 pieces on display, the exhibition has enough material to chart the full arc of his career. The works are arranged broadly ...”

“... more extraordinary that armed forces maintain impetus to attack despite heavy casualty rates. John Terraine’s The Right of the Line, a comprehensive, judicious and humane account of the RAF’s experience in the last European war, gives sympathetic attention to the stress experienced by aircrews in Bomber Command, which realised as time went on that men ...”

“... Cook, scientific director of the Grapple test series; some recent disclosures on the part of John Ward, who was employed at the British nuclear weapons laboratory at Aldermaston for six months during 1955; and a group of declassified US documents obtained by Robert Norris of the Natural Resources Defence Council in Washington. It may well be that there ...”

“... in effect, slaves. ‘The railway,’ Hochschild writes, ‘was a modest engineering success and a major human disaster. Men succumbed to accidents, dysentery, smallpox, beriberi and malaria, all exacerbated by bad food and relentless floggings by the two-hundred-man railway militia force … Some estimates … place the non-white [deaths] close to 1800 a year ...”

“... of how a degree-less provincial could match university-educated courtly playwrights such as John Lyly at their own game. The other writer, however, dealt with French current affairs and the social position of education in a different manner: GUISE: My Lord of Anjou, there are a hundred Protestants Which we have chased into the river Seine That swim ...”

“... soon not know about. Ministers went on making soothing statements. The Agriculture Secretary, then John Gummer, notoriously fed his daughter a beefburger on television. It became clear, too, that in some way officialdom was leaning on the vets and scientists in officialdom’s pay, telling them to damp down their cries of alarm. ‘They didn’t seem to want ...”

“... the Holy Grail for the Knights Not Round the Table – Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Sir Bill Cash, Sir John Redwood et al – and they have devoted their adult lives to it. But they have more in mind than this. They hope also to undo the constitutional and administrative reforms of the Blair years. What they want to achieve is a simplification of democracy. The ...”

“... for ‘When will my people be free?’‘For Scots with mixed [English and Scottish] parentage,’ John Lloyd wrote in the Financial Times in 2012, ‘a forced choice is uncomfortable. Should we, on the model of American blacks, claim “blackness” – or in this case Scottishness – as our dominant identity?’ Lloyd was not alone in feeling that his ...”

“... ignorant, the most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman Catholics in Christendom,’ John Adams, the second American president, wrote in 1815. The notion that they could form a ‘confederation of free governments’, as the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda had proposed, was as ‘absurd as similar plans would be to establish ...”

“... is among the wonders of English poetry, comparable only to that of his greatest poetic hero, John Keats, who inevitably features in the list of luminaries with whom Owen compares Sassoon in a particularly excessive epistolary tribute:Know that since mid-September, when you still regarded me as a tiresome little knocker on your door, I held you as Keats ...”

“... had been the chairman of Eurotunnel, was appointed to run the Strategic Rail Authority, created by John Prescott in 1999 to give direction to the privatised industry. Morton commissioned a report from Atkins and Ernst & Young to assess whether there was a need for such a line. By the time they reported in 2003, Morton – who was too outspoken to occupy such a ...”