“... of democracy and with it the BBC and Patten. In 1997, Murdoch was more interested in wrecking John Major’s media legislation than anything else, and had procured from Tony Blair a promise that once in power he would dilute any such legislation. McKnight also argues – convincingly – that were Murdoch interested only in the opinion polls he would have ...”

“... factors too. He likes to combine ‘chance and the creative will’, and wrote a poem about John Cage using the I Ching. He said he composed the opening lines of his great work Sunstone (1957) ‘in a state that was almost like sleepwalking’, and added that he was ‘shocked that those lines later struck [him] as beautiful’. But then the unconscious ...”

“... hymns and liturgical texts. One could scarcely imagine a better concise guide to the Scrolls than John Collins’s The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Biography. Collins, who teaches at Yale, writes with clarity and liveliness, and throughout his account exercises great judiciousness, a quality that has not always been prominent in discussions of this subject. For the ...”

“... triumph of a perverted and endlessly corrupting liberalism’. After a drive-by shooting of John Rawls (‘he had no convincing vision of the good society or the good life’), and a wildly constructive misreading of Rawls’s famous ‘veil of ignorance’, Blond ties himself in verbal knots as he tries to assert that the liberal state is destined to ...”

“... the 1790s (which included a letter from Elizabeth I thanking him for his ‘prettye Verses’) and John Payne Collier in the 1830s and 1840s (which showed Shakespeare to have been a well-connected member of metropolitan literary circles from an early stage). But for Shapiro the real villain is Edmond Malone. The usual story is that Malone, as he himself ...”

“... part-Spanish friend is often ‘black’ if there is a hint of Africa in his or her make-up. John Bellew, the husband of Clare Kendry in Nella Larsen’s exquisite novel Passing (1929), responds violently when he finds out that Clare, who has cheeks of ‘ivory’ and hair the colour of ‘pale gold’, is ‘black’. All those years, ...”

“... the while; the car-bomb attacks on the West End of London and Glasgow airport and have-a-go hero John Smeaton’s assault on one of the bombers; the floods that put large parts of Yorkshire and the Midlands under water; the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Portugal. The narrator starts the book as an ‘I’. Later, a ‘he’ appears who, it gradually ...”

“... Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Even those, John Campbell suggests, who have little or no memory of Margaret Thatcher, live in a world she created; and from which there is no going back. More than any other British prime minister, even Gladstone, she conforms to Max Weber’s type of the modern demagogic politician: the leader who appeals directly to the electorate over the heads of the party machine; and who subordinates the machine to his or her political personality ...”

“... Many years later, in the ‘worn memorial’ of the Baker Street buffet under Chiltern Court, John Betjeman sought inspiration for his poem ‘The Metropolitan Railway’, with its opening invocation: ‘Early Electric! With what radiant hope/Men formed this many-branched electrolier’. A stained glass windmill and ‘sepia views of leafy lanes in ...”

“... in Drumcliffe, but my grandfather’s questions were echoed in the Picture Post of 9 October 1948. John Ormond Thomas, a staff journalist, had made inquiries at Roquebrune and ‘despite close questioning and examination of all the people who should have been able to produce conclusive proof’ he was ‘still not convinced’ of the identity of the body in ...”

“... its indigenous and non-indigenous populations should include a formal apology for past injustices. John Howard, who became Prime Minister in 1996, has repeatedly rejected what he regards as an over-apologetic tendency, epitomised by certain policies of the previous Labor Government, and by references in the Australian High Court’s Mabo judgment, which ...”

“... the basis of ocean food chains. The Aswan Dam and Thomas Midgely both have a place in John McNeill’s excellent environmental history of the 20th century. McNeill has done a vast amount of reading and his range is truly global. He discusses the effects of oil extraction from Tampico to the Niger delta, the problems caused by air pollution from ...”

“... alone on the Left in their ability to raise the obvious questions about how the world works. As John Lloyd puts it in his opening chapter: ‘The global movements’ – his term for the anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation milieu – ‘have found new ways of exercising political power . . . They can generate widespread public sympathy and a degree of ...”

“... position to propagate Catholic views, and he returned to England in 1856, where he was asked by John Henry Newman to go to Dublin, with the prospect of becoming professor of English literature at Newman’s new Catholic university. It was a disaster for Julia, Arnold’s wife, but ” to Newman it felt like a providential coup: the son of the leading ...”

“... of the high-minded Germans, but liberty as the right to be cussedly, bloody-mindedly oneself. ‘John is John,’ as Tony Blair wryly murmured of John Prescott when he punched a demonstrator, suggests something of this tautological quality. This brand of liberty is not in principle ...”