“... 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 ...”

“... series of Olney Hymns, written at the behest of his mentor, the ex-slave-trader-turned-gospeller, John Newton. But the spell of Evangelicalism soon broke (there are signs even in the hymns: ‘Oh! for a closer walk with God’). When the placebo of faith ceased to work as a specific against despair, he was plunged into deeper gulfs of madness. He heard the ...”

“... of the scholarly pretences of his fellow economists and of all manner of other balderdash, John Kenneth Galbraith’s only reticence hides a skilfully disguised but intense puritanism. He may not suffer the classic puritan’s agonies at the thought that somebody, somewhere is having a good time, but if contentment is a goal for the rest of us, it is ...”

“... Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg were making Action Painting famous; and he and John Ashbery, his friend and contemporary, must have felt their poetry belonged in tandem with that school. O’Hara’s ‘Why I am not a painter’ doesn’t tell us why he is not a painter, but shows how the process of making a painting and making a poem can ...”

“... book in recent memory expressly to demand recognition for Kingsley Amis as a moralist; the other, John McDermott’s, is actually called Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist. McDermott says ‘moralist’ clearly and right away, whereas Salwak’s subtitle sounds like one of Amis’s phonetic reports on the way a drunken man might have struggled to get the word ...”

“... then who is left to man the supposedly overbearing metropolis, unless it is Kingsley Amis and John Betjeman? The ramparts so frailly manned should have given way long ago to the armies massed against them. What Crawford doesn’t realise is that this indeed has happened; he is sounding the bugle for an assault on a fortress that surrendered years ago. The ...”

“... for thirteen pence a day. Yet there is an unmistakable authenticity about Housman’s work. John Bayley starts his explorations by emphasising Housman’s pessimism, and this is not a mere set of ideas: it had grown from a personal disappointment deep into the roots of his mind. The Martyrdom of Man (1872) – Winwood Reade’s reach-me-down history of ...”

“... revulsion knew no limits. During her last aria she lies spreadeagled before the severed head of John the Baptist which between deep breaths she kisses and caresses with great theatrical gusto. I’m not suggesting that the director should have turned Salome into a Pollyanna – as Hollywood did in the 1953 film which had Rita Hayworth dance in order to save ...”

“... of Christmas from the Cuban calendar. But in Havana, I heard the extraordinary story of what John Paul II said to Fidel Castro during his audience at the Vatican late last year. The Holy Father, standing close to the President, took the opportunity to ask him why he had cancelled Christmas. The direct approach does not necessarily guarantee a ...”

“... the tradition of legal sanctuary clung on until James I finally ended it in 1623. A decade later, John Ford used sanctuary as a plot device in his play The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck (1634). Warbeck was a pretender who claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, one of the princes in the Tower murdered by Richard III. The new king, Henry VII, refers to ...”

“... he replied, ‘and it can be solved only by X-ray crystallography.’ The Great Sage was John Desmond Bernal, a flamboyant Irishman with a mane of fair hair, crumpled flannel trousers and a tweed jacket. We called him Sage, because he knew everything, from physics to the history of art. Knowledge poured from him as from a ...”