“... 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 ...”

“... 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 lineage of many of the most powerful figures in America today – Dick Cheney, George Bush, John Roberts, Samuel Alito – can be traced back through the Reagan administration. Conservatives disaffected with Bush accuse him of the worst sin they can imagine: betraying Reagan’s legacy. Even Democrats have forgotten the harsh feelings they once ...”

“... Epithets like ‘disenchanted’ come to mind. That is because I have been reading the latest of John Gage’s books, Colour in Art. Gage’s achievement, here and in Colour and Culture (1993) and its successor Colour and Meaning (1999), is to tinge colour with time like no writer before. His curious and scrupulous mind teases out countless nuances in our ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... administrations. And unpopular though the government is, it is nowhere near as unpopular as John Major’s was. Furthermore, some of its policies are so irrational and alarming – particularly, of course, those towards the Middle East and the United States – that they are put to one side, so to speak, regarded as a mad aberration, which means that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for John Betjeman) Miss Frith was put on processing; that glue And all those labels. Not seven months there, And Mr Mortimer, who always said ‘Miss Frith’ and never ‘Gill’ or ‘Gillian’, Right through the informal Nineteen-Sixties, Rested one day his two hands on her hips As she sat cross-legged on the high stool At the labelling desk ...”

“... skills. Fight to the death for any high ground you’re standing on my darling. I think of John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes. The window rattles again; rattles louder. It’s getting closer, faster and faster, whatever’s outside, and I know the Thames Barrier, small waters of our particular rivers, and this terrible readiness to worry about your own ...”

“... Clear. Sudden. You looking into the man inside.LD:You know a lot of musicians?JH:No. Well, some.LD:John Lennon?JH:Vaguely.LD:Vaguely [laughs]. Well here we are Heathrow. You seem to have some fans waiting.JH:Look like it. Whoah Nelly.LD:I’ll drive on to the next gate – they won’t see you.JH:No, let me out here this is good. OK man, thanks.[Exeunt LD in ...”

“... to be born and live as variously as possible.’ And yet in 1960 or 1961 she wrote him a ‘Dear John’ letter, ending their friendship. Her therapist had told her that her attachment to him was stifling other intimacies. O’Hara was wounded; friendships waxed and waned, but declaring a split in this way felt violent. ‘Giftwares’ (1955) O’Hara ...”

“... jumped, they fell, they cried. They played with dolls and flicked cherrystones at one another. John Dee, the Elizabethan astronomer and diarist, describes his son Arthur, aged about three, playing with a friend’s daughter, Mary Herbert, making ‘as it were a show of childish marriage, of calling each other husband and wife’. Francis Segar, trying to ...”

“... He affects​ the Metaphysics,’ Dryden wrote of John Donne, ‘not only in his satires, but in his Amorous Verses, where Nature alone should reign; and perplexes the Minds of the Fair Sex with nice Speculations of Philosophy, when he shou’d ingage their Hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of Love ...”