“... I had​ this foresight,’ John Updike’s mother, Linda, once told a journalist, ‘that if I married his father the results would be amazing.’ Was Updike amazing? In the most simple terms, which were the ones he favoured, he was an exemplary American success story: a child of the Depression who passed from a hardscrabble youth through the halls of the meritocracy to become a rich man on the earnings of his fiction ...”

“... is a mysterious foundling, identified only by his preposterous name, brought up by elderly foster-parents in the village of Entepfuhl (based on Ecclefechan where Carlyle was born). Details of his early life, before acquiring his post at the new University of Weissnichtwo, are represented as sketchy and possibly unreliable, but we understand that the ...”

“... Private Gardens of London. Written by a landscape gardener, and beautifully photographed by John Miller, the book’s focus is a series of nearly forty gardens from different parts of the metropolis. The Museum of London’s scheme to collect pictures and photographs of London gardens will surely result in a more representative sample, but this is a ...”

“... ideal bureaucracy famously described by Max Weber. The effect was rather to irrationalise it, to foster an ever more baroque state edifice built on the shaky foundations of proprietary office-holding, tax farming and other forms of private ‘appropriation’ of public powers. Ertman sharply distinguishes the resulting ‘patrimonial absolutism’ from the ...”

“... specialises in strip-searching delinquent Mexican males, but finds true love in the arms of Big John, a massively-endowed black drug-pusher. There are riots and burning in the barrios, a fixed election, a major kidnapping, and a good old American assassination by a ‘lone crazed killer’ who keeps a picture of Jodie ...”

“... in the popular audience perhaps played a part in the failure of the 18th-century academies to foster painting of this sort, although I know of only one contemporary commentator who even hinted that the prospects of high art might be in any way connected with the priorities of evangelism. This was Horace Walpole, who whimsically hoped that the Methodists ...”

“... Marsh Arabs. As well as the interview with Thesiger, there is one with another ‘post-imperial John Buchan character’, David Stirling, who added that new regiment to the Army. The interview is dated 1974, a bad year in Britain, when Stirling launched an organisation to train people to keep sewers and power stations operational in emergency. He had ...”

“... generation after his death. His contemporaries Goethe and Darwin admired him; so would Thoreau and John Muir. Many places and things in the natural world now bear his name: a current in the Pacific Ocean, towns in Kansas, Nebraska and Saskatchewan, a county in California, a university in Berlin, not to mention a penguin, a bat, a cactus, an orchid, a mushroom ...”

“... told Cushla he’d love to bath her’.Other details are more pointed. Michael takes Cushla to see John Lavery’s Easter Rising painting, The Trial of Sir Roger Casement, which he admires for being ‘so quietly subversive’; we don’t need to hear Cushla say so to know that, in her world, quiet subversion is a category error. Visiting the McGeown family on ...”

“... In the polarised atmosphere of George III’s reign, a host of political clubs took root. John Wilkes’s success in mobilising antigovernment sentiment during the 1760s owed much to a battery of radical associations, including the Anti-Gallican, Beefsteak and Albion clubs, and the masonic lodges. From the 1790s the Society for Constitutional ...”

“... defender of a view that, in its logical structure and basic values, adheres to the tradition of John Stuart Mill. Raz believes that liberal institutions are justified because, for those civilisations capable of sustaining them, they provide the best way of promoting human well-being: their value, in other words, is instrumental. The argument depends both on ...”

“... to the orthodox Christian Church. If all sinners were to be saved, what is the reward of virtue? John the Baptist would be treated no better than the Devil. If the mildly good were to be confused with the very good, the favoured status of ascetic monks would disintegrate. Under Origen’s regime – horror of horrors – brothel-keepers would eventually ...”

“... of a story in the first-ever children’s periodical, the Lilliputian Magazine, brought out by John Newbery in 1751, and with its theme of character-moulding (a silly little girl is cured of vanity through suffering a fright) it set the tone for a good deal of juvenile magazine fiction for some time. Right up until the 1930s and Forties, characters in the ...”

“... when an unhealed wound remains? Not long before the vote, the point was cruelly rubbed in. John Howard’s Liberal-Coalition government made the unusual decision to invade its own country, by sending the Australian Defence Force into the Northern Territory. His aim was to deal decisively with concerns about child abuse and corruption among the mainly ...”

“... Fear of Jewish influence on the movies merged with anxieties over the medium’s potential to foster indecency and glamorise violence. Motion pictures were under widespread attack for the presentation of crime, the treatment of sex and the corruption of American youth. Massive press coverage of the Fatty Arbuckle case (the popular screen comedian was ...”