“... would conclude that legislation in this area was a mistake, a view expressed on television by Sir John Wheeler, Conservative chairman of the Select Committee on Home Affairs – if so, those hopes were disappointed. Why were the terms of reference so narrow in any case? Discussion about the effectiveness of anti-discrimination legislation, as the report ...”

“... Some of us who are neither historians nor political scientists have by chance become aware, as was John Adams at the time, that what happened in the US between 1776 and 1783 was so demonstrably different from what happened in France ten or twelve years later, that to call them both ‘revolutions’ is merely obfuscating. Professor Hill, every inch a ...”

“... some fellow inhabitants of privileged and artistic society the pleasure may not be unmixed. Sir John Pope-Hennessy testifies that Roger was a ‘much kinder, more liberal, more positive person that the diary suggests’. That such virtues were valued by Hinks, even if rarely displayed in his writings, may perhaps be deduced from the exclamations he made on ...”

“... became known as the ‘Slade cropheads’. They wore baggy smock dresses modelled on Augustus John’s gypsy drawings and found themselves written about – in both admiring and satirical terms – in the college magazine. For all her later fame in the close orbit of the Bloomsbury set, Carrington had a modest upbringing as the daughter of a railway ...”

“... case. In the next frame they are looking at the sea. The brothers are Eli and Charlie, played by John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix. Reilly is also the producer of the work, having seen in DeWitt’s novel a starting point for the film. The screenplay is by Audiard and Thomas Bidegain. The performances of Reilly and Phoenix are amazing, and lead us back to ...”

“... that prepares us for what is to come. We will be better prepared, perhaps, if we have noticed that John Malkovich is on the cast list, playing a Southern park ranger, a bit of impeccably unlikely casting matched only by the same actor’s recent appearance as Hercule Poirot on the BBC. The opening is very smooth, and just a little too noir for its own ...”

“... doctrine definitively trumpeted by Milton and Locke, and knocked into some sort of final shape by John Stuart Mill? Even before you get to today’s remix of the debate, you cannot help noticing two features of it. First, the zealots today are no longer the progressives on the left – liberals, socialists, trade unionists. Instead they are predominantly on ...”

“... or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem’ was a recipe for failure. In July 1964, however, he was asked by John McNaughton, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, to join him in the Pentagon as his special assistant. The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had given McNaughton responsibility for co-ordinating strategy towards ...”

“... Arms. (The reproduction ‘made such an impression on me and so many others of my generation’, John Richardson later wrote.) The painting was shown in a Mayfair gallery, where it was bought by Michael Sadler, whose collection included work by Kandinsky, Rouault and Modigliani. Bacon’s next ambitious work was called Wound for a Crucifixion. ...”

“... began by aborting Constitutional change and is ending in a state of Constitutional rigor mortis. John Major’s Government contemplates no political evolution whatever on the mainland, as distinct from in Ireland, and advertises this rigidity as ‘defence of the Union’. When it founders, however, such intransigence will be overtaken by long overdue ...”

“... Inn, a half-lit lobby, a gleam of tile, our turn-signal pulsing on the glass. AutoZone and Long John Silvers, the Chevron and the Lamplighter – the ballad of Cerrillos Road: a serious business, this artery of tar and rubber, the local life-support. The bus splashes its ankles in the slow lane. We crunch and slurp through slush, bounce down a block ...”

“... between them, as if Adrift on some superannuated schooner. Nearby, on another Kind of scaffold, John Stubbs gallantly raised his hat to the cheering crowd With his left hand, and blessed the Queen, while her Executioner held aloft his right.                            Then he fainted. I’ve the taste Of azure and wind in my ...”

“... or rather J.J. Beegan did. When I turned to the Irish census records I could quite easily find John Beegan, who was born in 1868, the eldest child of John and Jane Beegan. In 1901 they were living together with the younger Beegans, Mary and Thomas, at 23 Dunlo Hill in Ballinasloe. On the census form, ...”

“... of his expenses claims. Now he discovers that there is an article by one of his predecessors, John Major, which attacks him in highly personal terms. He decides he must ring the Telegraph’s editor to put the record straight. He has to do this on a train to Bradford, where he is due to unveil a memorial in honour of a local police officer, Sharon ...”

“... as an idyllic apogee of national self-definition. By the time Shakespeare and his apprentice John Fletcher co-wrote All Is True (printed as Henry VIII) in 1613, wistfulness for the previous reign was already growing, despite what the playwrights and others may have recalled about Tudor rule: agricultural depression, enclosure, the plague, the poor law ...”