“... Soho. Closer inspection reveals a Metro sign across the street, surely the clincher. But no: John Davenport, writing in Lilliput 17 years later, claimed he knew the joint concerned. ‘If you know Hastings really well you may recognise it.’ Hastings or wherever (‘Burra-Burra Land’ Davenport called it), Burra created here one of his finest greed ...”

“... as The Case of Sodomy, in the Tryal of Mervin Lord Audley, Earl of Castlehaven and The Case of John Atherton, Bishop of Waterford in Ireland; who was Convicted of the Sin of Uncleanness with a Cow, and other Creatures (both 1710); Fielding also misses the transparent pose of righteous indignation that Curll typically adopted to veil, and at the same time ...”

“... James Earl Ray, killer of Martin Luther King Jr, obviously had help from the establishment, as did John Wilkes Booth, who did away with Lincoln. As Finn says, not everyone believes that Booth was really gunned down eleven days after the assassination in his hideout at Garrett’s farm in Virginia. Was his body ever plausibly identified? And how to explain the ...”

“... In bed​, John Berger was once asked by a lover: who’s your favourite painter? Caravaggio, he replied. There are two kinds of desire, according to Berger: the desire to take and the ‘desire to be taken’. Caravaggio painted the second kind. The desire ‘to lose oneself’, ‘the most abandoned, the most desperate’ form of wanting: this is what Caravaggio put on the canvas ...”

“... cities’. Other socialists, including his fellow Scots and near contemporaries Tom Johnston and John Wheatley, worked as MacDonald did as journalists or publishers, but tended to be involved in campaigning publications, Johnston as the editor of the socialist weekly Forward and Wheatley as the writer and publisher of socialist books. While he conceived of ...”

“... control their own fate: ‘We are out for life and all that life can give us,’ the revolutionary John Maclean said at his trial for sedition in 1918. George Square, 31 January 1919 My grandparents met at a Glasgow ILP branch sometime around the end of the First World War, and I’ve always had a rather romantic view of the party and of that ...”

“... and the spread of industrial cities could make no aesthete happy. But Lancaster, and friends like John Betjeman and John Piper, were part of the movement that encouraged action. Neither Preservation Societies nor the refinement of planning zones could do much about making a new world to their taste, but they did safeguard ...”

“... archaeological evidence and inference, bypass the fevered imagination of William Blake’s and John Martin’s Bible illustrations and hear the voice of a Mesopotamian Pepys? Well, not exactly, but the range and character of what is written down give some idea of the texture of everyday life in Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon. The majority of tablets may be the ...”

“... on reality – must be like Wordsworth’s experience of two consciousnesses, or like the turn, as John Sturrock describes it in The Language of Autobiography, that occurs when the autobiographer sees their written self suddenly cohere. The place condenses into the image; nothing more can be seen now. Vilhelm Hammershøi’s ‘Montague Street in ...”

“... in a doomsday vault in Svalbard in case of ‘apocalyptic extinction events’, as he called them. John was wearing a plaid shirt and a poacher’s jacket; his moustache drooped and his teeth were furred with plaque. He said he was a hunter and forager. I asked him what this involved and he told me he collected nuts and berries on Walthamstow marshes and ate ...”

“... final version will come into effect at the beginning of next year. There had been worries about John Whittingdale, the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, and the plans he might have for the BBC, but the organisation envisioned in the White Paper isn’t vastly different from the BBC as we know it. The £3.7 billion from the licence fee will ...”

“... who failed the abstraction test but are surely greater talents: Cedric Morris, Augustus John, Paul and John Nash, Tristram Hillier and, perhaps the most underrated, Edward Burra. Burra’s big watercolour The Straw Man (1963) – showing a group of male figures on urban wasteland, involved in some kind of ritual ...”

“... his poems, though, that while in the East he chased up images of Buddha with what his biographer John Haffenden calls ‘a learned amateur interest amounting to an obsession’. The offhand phrase about Marvell is a bit of English disguise: camouflaged passion rather than easy generality. Empson taught literature in Japan from 1931 to 1934, and in China from ...”

“... so great a claim to the gratitude of his country’. Less than two years later an ex-colleague, John Cam Hobhouse, commented: ‘I am surprised how, by mere fluency of speech and arrogance of manner, this really inferior man has contrived to lead a great party, and to connect his name imperishably with the most splendid triumphs of British ...”

“... for being captured 13 times and 17 times sold into slavery, going from the Ethiopia of Prester John to the Japan of the Daimyos and St Francis Xavier? Some say that he was a prodigy, as well as one of the great Portuguese classics, the prose equivalent of Camoens; others say that he was a liar. Rebecca Catz says that he was a satirist, that his whole ...”