“... bush knives whispered Like settling locusts or long- Promised waterfalls. One sticky morning John Hanning Speke awoke on a spur above Lake Tanganyika with a ferocious headache, Blind as an earthworm. The clear lake waters rippled And sighed, then flared like a peacock’s tail beneath the whitening ...”

“... She rose from the not-so-bonny Bank of Clyde (Bombed to a pit for its pains in ’41). Meanwhile, John Masefield wrote a handsome poem (‘Shredding a trackway like a mile of snow . . .’) And Harry Lauder roamed the yard with pride. She ploughed across the Atlantic in four days, Loud with the ‘rich and famous’, only the seasick Inlaid pianos suffering ...”

“... events yield up their secrets easily, reproduces the attitude of one of his principal witnesses, John of Salisbury. John knew Thomas, was exiled with him and was in Canterbury when the Archbishop was struck down. Thomas’s posthumous miracles took John by surprise: but he accepted them ...”

“... in common, including ‘They flee from me’, ‘And wilt thou leave me thus?’ and ‘Mine own John Poyntz’. Where they differ in choice, it might be ventured that Jones’s, though still plangent, is more various in subject. He also includes Surrey’s fine epitaph: ‘Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest.’ While both editors give generous ...”

“... All her life, she seemed curiously fixed in childhood. In December 1957, Marianne met Lt Col John Kelly while working as an interpreter for the US Army, and they were married exactly a year later. On 25 May 1959, Petra’s half-sister was born and named Grace Patricia after the Princess of Monaco. Soon afterwards, ...”

“... well have learned the basics of the art from the recycled works of that universal publisher, Dr John Trusler (d. 1820): ‘Be not dark or mysterious; Affect not absence of mind; Punch no one in conversation; Hold no one by the button; Spit not on the carpet; Dare to be prudish; Avoid mauvaise honte.’ (‘What’s mauvaise honte, Mamma?’ – ‘Oh, ask ...”

“... because of his opposition to the despatch of the Falklands task force. Much of the anger in John Silkin’s posthumously published book is directed against Anthony Wedgwood Benn. Labour’s internal wars of the late Seventies are refought here, culminating in the 1981 election for the Party’s deputy leadership, in which Silkin stood as standard-bearer ...”

“... called Robert Nairac gave Holroyd a Polaroid photograph of the dead body of an IRA leader called John Green. Nairac, later to be shot himself, told Holroyd he had taken the picture after personally shooting Green. Nairac said that he and two Protestant terrorists had crossed the border in order to shoot Green. Much more horrific (since the victims had ...”

“... albeit one with greater relish for his wit than respect for his political judgment. So much for John Vincent, the brilliant author of The Formation of the Liberal Party who became the populist professor of the Thatcherite tabloid press. Whatever else he has lost in the process, it is not his ironic sense of humour, and in appraising one of Disraeli’s ...”

“... development. Where Harewood seems a born professional musician, self-bred as an amateur, the late John Culshaw was the born musical amateur, whose eventual breeding was to become ever more professional. In 1967, his last year as a gramophonist and the projected last of his unfinished memoirs, he was even appointed Head of the BBC’s television music, beating ...”

“... sister Joanna (or Martha – the name is in doubt) were the youngest of ten daughters of the late John Taaffe of Smarmore Castle, Co. Louth. At the ages of 26 and 30 respectively, they have been despatched to Rome by the current head of the family, their half-brother, another John Taaffe, to visit a distant kinsman, Lord ...”

“... of the Thirties almost certainly leads to a distorted view of the poet’s politics. Since John Quinn sent him a volume of selections from Nietzsche in 1902, Yeats had been a fascinated admirer. The Nietzsche he aligned with Blake and Shelley in Ideas of Good and Evil, while acknowledged to be ‘violent’, was clearly on the side of the good angels ...”

“... itself is a scandal. Their disapproval of the honours system must be taken for granted. John Walker is presumably more open-minded, and willing to speak as he finds, though what exactly an enquirer finds must depend on his general perspectives. ‘This book started,’ we are told, ‘as an article for Labour Research.’ Walker spent five years in ...”

“... like Beaverbrook who ‘failed to secure the re-election of Churchill in 1945’. The entry on John Masefield strikes a new note. ‘In “Sea Fever” he wrote: “I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gipsy life,” but, in fact, he had settled in London, and in 1907 began to work on the Manchester Guardian.’ Naturally one turns to Yeats to ...”

“... Most of the great positive evils of the world,’ John Stuart Mill asserted in 1863, ‘are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced to within narrow limits.’ This sort of confidence in the reality and efficacy of progress now seems to set the 19th century distinctively apart from our own ...”