“... a different narrative in a principal narrative – witness the Odyssey and the Gospels (Salome and John the Baptist). Johnson’s plan to revolutionise the novel came down to the use of ‘devices’ intended to disrupt ordinary forms of attention by involving the physical book itself, the material base of writing, in unusual ways, as if to take revenge on it ...”

“... Roger Harris​ is from Roxbury, in Boston. For decades he taught in the school system there. He wears a grey pinstripe suit; his smart bow-tie has a purple streak. He looks patient yet tough, as durable as a former athlete. But he had days in 1967 as a young Marine near the DMZ in Vietnam – the demilitarised zone, aka the ‘dead Marine zone’ – that he can’t talk about:You go over there with one mindset and then you adapt ...”

“... have taken a very different line, and in their chapter on the general law of medical negligence John Finch and Robert Cowley (respectively an academic and a practising lawyer) commend them for doing so. The Canadian Supreme Court has pointed out that what is a reasonable risk to a doctor is not always so to the patient, and that to allow medical judgment ...”

“... but the use made of those failures by the endlessly influential revolutionary propaganda of John Mitchel, which presented the disaster as a deliberate genocide, arousing answering echoes to this day in American school curriculums. America remains relevant. The construction of ‘advanced’ Irish nationalism at home relied on buttressing from ...”

“... children had been thrown, was ‘sacred ground’. Dyer, like Neill and the equally psychopathic John Nicholson, was notable for his piety. Wagner might also have reached further back, to Rollo Gillespie’s execution of hundreds of unarmed prisoners in a fives court after the mutiny at Vellore in 1806, which recalls Dyer’s brutal floggings on the tennis ...”

“... men – ‘the very intelligent and … those who serve our cause as soldiers’. When the actor John Wilkes Booth heard that remark he warned: ‘That means nigger citizenship! Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.’ Three days later, on Good Friday, Booth made good on his threat, shooting Lincoln at Ford’s ...”

“... have, I imagine, met those specifications. But the one who comes first to an American’s mind is John Dewey: a man whose engagement in primary and higher education, and whose active participation in politics, were considerably more extensive than Russell’s – and, I should argue, more focused, intelligent and useful. Dewey was the most prominent ...”

“... the outer firth.The bigger and more glamorous yards lay upriver at Dumbarton and Clydebank, where John Brown’s built the Queens for Cunard, and inside Glasgow’s city boundaries, where five or six companies on both banks (among them Harland & Wolff, Fairfield and Barclay Curle) gave Auden his ‘glade of cranes’. Downriver, the engine works and slipways ...”

“... and scolds them for their errors about Spinoza, but I find Dawkins and Hitchens (and Sam Harris) companionable, as I find Johnston himself, and feel no resultant stress. Johnston gives ground to no one in his disdain for the idolaters – all ordinary believers – and there’s a great deal to be said from his perspective that can be read as ...”

“... 1743, Anna Letitia Aikin was the product of a distinguished Unitarian background, the daughter of John Aikin, a revered teacher at the Warrington Academy. The academy was effectively the leading university for those dissenters who had enough money to get an education but who were forbidden by law to take degrees at Oxford or Cambridge. Although, like all such ...”

“... ship was put back on an even keel. Curiously, although the Grosart debacle, fully documented in John Bicknell’s edition of Stephen’s letters, is briefly mentioned in Alan Bell’s exemplary entry on Stephen in the ODNB, these misdemeanours make no appearance in Arthur Sherbo’s entry on Grosart. Thereafter, the DNB maintained its announced schedule ...”

“... instrument case inevitably calls to mind Michele Rollman’s instrument case; Lyle Ashton Harris finds a counterpart in Chris Ofili; Fiona Rae’s paintings even reminded me for a split second of Lari Pittman’s. And then, to go on in a slighdy different vein, doesn’t Goldsmith’s = CalArts and doesn’t Michael Craig Martin = Michael Asher, and ...”

“... of the fresh-painted lanes at the base of the Bow Flyover, leading to Stratford, to Daniel Harris, crushed by a bus filled with Olympic correspondents being shuttled between venues. The towpath alongside Regent’s Canal has for some time been dominated by a peloton of hard-peddling commuters. Now the strip of pavement at the approach to Haggerston ...”

“... mothers, and a gallery of individuals working and living in near destitution. In Shoreditch, a Mr Harris, with his wife and children, was being ‘eaten alive by bugs’; in another ‘vile room’ in the same tenement, his elderly neighbour Mr Jones painted ‘Christmas sheets’ (presumably wrapping paper) from 9 a.m. every morning, managing forty dozen in ...”

“... appears a certain natural goodness verging on modesty.’ Three centuries later, in 1956, David Harris Willson’s biography took the hostile line. Scottish historians tended to be fairer, prompting Jenny Wormald to ask in 1983 whether James was ‘two kings or one?’, so different were his historical reputations north and south of the border. Wormald and ...”