“... be printed beautifully and I’ll sign them all. They’ll be put into portfolios and be sold. John Loker and I got drunk in Ireland last summer and he and I and Nicky Watts decided to bicycle from Land’s End to John O’Groats this summer. I had not ridden a bike since I was a schoolboy, but they were pretty fit. So I ...”

“... new ideas to people like Menocchio. An Italian translation of the 14th-century Travels of Sir John Mandeville revealed to him the existence of the quite different civilisations and religions of Islam, India and China. He also probably read the Koran, of which an Italian translation appeared in Venice in 1547. This is another example of the republic’s ...”

“... government. And in the best essay in the volume – full of substance yet light in manner – John McKenna attacks Elton in the nicest possible way from the other end, by showing how the principal features of the ‘revolutionised’ 16th-century state – nationalism, the imperial crown and reform – were all present in 15th-century England and arguably ...”

“... mean something like ‘went boldly on public record’. To his intimates he was candid enough. To John Blaikie, one of his earliest friends, he recounted in 1874 how, on the occasion of an accident that had put him in fear of death, ‘the Christian revealed religion had never seemed so little worthy of belief.’ When A.C. Benson asked him what he believed ...”

“... she finds Mrs Taylor taking photographs of snails copulating, and Alan Taylor – who since John Betjeman’s death has styled himself ‘the nation’s Parkinsonist’ – lying on the floor recovering from delirium. The diarist comments: ‘Cynthia just did not know what to say: snail sexuality in the garden, delirious dreams – and from outside, the ...”

“... John Maynard Keynes is famous for his private life and associations with Bloomsbury and famous, too, as the economist who campaigned for public works between the wars, and revolutionised economics with his General Theory. A biographer of Keynes has to straddle two very different worlds, and it is one measure of Robert Skidelsky’s achievement that he writes with equal authority of both in this deeply researched and densely textured book ...”

“... the Birmingham Six, and the old decencies seem perilously contingent. To take one actor in Annan. John Buchan – in some ways a key figure of politics and culture in 20th-century Scotland – appears as a straightforward inter-war Tory, a somewhat archaic consensus-monger tainted by Appeasement. Seen from the north, he is much more ...”

“... and fiancée. Büchner, it seems, packed a lifetime of intense experience into very few years. John Reddick’s view of Büchner is the polar opposite of that taken by Georg Lukács. In an essay written in Moscow in 1937, ‘The Real Georg Büchner and his Fascist Misrepresentation’, Lukács announced that Büchner’s ‘basic trait was a burning ...”

“... keep them involved in the negotiating process for as long as possible was fiercely criticised by John Pilger and others, but in the event the strategy was vindicated. For the time being anyway, Pol Pot has been denied a decisive role in Cambodian politics. These are great (and unforeseen) achievements. And they rest on a solid basis of diplomatic and ...”

“... advocacy of slavery was undoubtedly intended as a provocation, but was not necessarily insincere. John Law of Lauriston made his own distinctive contribution to the debate, in Money and Trade Considered: with a Proposal for Supplying the Nation with Money (1705). Law’s panacea was a system of paper money, underwritten not by precious metals or the ...”

“... a few unrighteous men (contrary to the deluge),’ Pope, who lost money himself, was to write. John Gay was ruined, and in a letter written weeks after prices crashed, explains that he can’t settle his book-buying bill ‘at a time when it is impractible to sell out of the Stocks in which my fortune is engag’d’. How Tonson must have chuckled. He ...”

“... any thing before nor would not now.Thomas Lomax felt his misfortune ‘a daily source of grief’; John Stafford’s family were shoeless, workless, creditless and hopeless, ‘reduced to the lowest extremity’, by the time he put pen to paper in ‘painful anxiety’. Men resolved that if helped they would find work, women assured ‘the gentlemen’ they ...”

“... boldness, brutality and tragedy for all concerned central to the history of British colonialism. John and Alick Carnegie, Empire wanderers on the make, borrowed their fare from the Mair Tea Company and ended up in cholera and malaria-infested Brahmaputra with a handful of imported bushes in uncleared jungle. Their letters deteriorate from chirpy, blind ...”

“... our personal and social selves. The Mabo papers are a triumph for a land imprinted with memory. John Gascoigne’s The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia is concerned with the imprint of a ‘European’ spirit on Australia between 1788 and 1850. There is a difficulty, however, in describing this transposed culture, which ceases to be ...”

“... John McGahern is an extraordinary writer of charm and violence. His most recent novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002), has a looseness and a gaiety which it took him nearly seventy years to allow himself. His earlier work marked him as one of the great writers of claustrophobia. His novels tend to evoke small places – single houses or tiny communities – and to crush into those places a set of family and moral ties that make them feel even smaller and tighter ...”