“... Lever. Apart from myself, two other victims of Barbara’s midnight spleen are Roy Hattersley and John Silkin. John Silkin, a ‘failure’ at the Department of the Environment, is forgiven in a footnote because of his ‘success’ at the Ministry of Agriculture. Perhaps for once she is too generous. Because of the General ...”

“... child of a working mother she was inside a classroom from her earliest years. As a teacher, she took her own babies into the classroom. Her husband was also – and always – her headmaster. And when he died and she went abroad to satisfy a lifelong ambition to escape into a fuller artistic life, she was soon working in North American universities as a ...”

“... phenomenon is so striking that it has been exhaustively chronicled; and an inevitable drawback to John Lehmann’s survey of The English Poets of the First World War is that so many of his poets seem already chosen for him, so many of his conclusions already foregone. The excellence of the illustrations, the urbanity of the author’s prose, tempt one to ...”

“... that flourished in Manhattan in the first third of the 20th century. Celebrity caricature took off from and fostered a shared world of famous people affectionately known by their public personas. That club was not one that Groucho Marx refused to join. On the contrary, it supplied the ground for his retort, after Jack Warner threatened a copyright ...”

“... John Major has now been prime minister for four years. For us, as presumably for him, it often seems a lifetime, so crowded has his premiership been with crises of one sort or another. Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldon not unreasonably, therefore, think this the moment to assess his prime ministerial career; the result is The Major Effect, a collection of 26 essays by a distinguished group of commentators – including the editors ...”

“... is ‘Howard’s way’ – more police, longer sentences and moral discipline. In December John Major was asked (and it is a constant refrain): ‘WHY do criminals get more help than their victims? WHY do you starve the police of cash and resources? Each and every one of us is waiting for your reply. Because it could be OUR families next.’ Assuaging ...”

“... three hundred years ago. After studying London hospital records covering nearly a century, Dr John Arbuthnot concluded that, in every year, more boys had been born than girls; each year on record was a ‘male year’. Why was this? We can imagine a mad style of reductionist explanation, accessible only to a prurient deity: describe the physical and ...”

“... a great personage, there is a need to look elsewhere for a more discriminating view. Inevitably, John Grigg’s biography of Lloyd George invites such comparisons and they redound almost wholly to Grigg’s credit, except in one obvious respect: beginning at much the same time, Gilbert actually finished the job, albeit reinforced in his labours by a research ...”

“... the page. Boswell, a slovenly, scribbling, lovable Scot, and Johnson, a cantankerous old genius, a John Bull himself, now appear to us as creatures of one another’s making. Together they constitute a minor archipelago of literary selves.In the past it seemed natural to admire one at the expense of the other, and most natural of all, to see Boswell as the ...”

“... this shift, occasionally making things worse. Just before our gathering, the zombie chieftain John Howard had delivered a refulgent message of thanks on TV, making it plain his new government would turn first to workplace legislation. The aim would be reform in the interest of small business – boosting enterprise by making hiring and firing much ...”

“... United Mine Workers of America. He joined the union and his wife hung a portrait of its president, John L. Lewis, above her piano. But the Turners, like other Black families in town, were used by mine supervisors to destroy the solidarity between miners, in an attempt to break the union. The UMWA had been integrated since its founding in 1890 and in parts of ...”

“... was uneventful, ‘at least until it started to go wrong’. From articled pupil in the office of John Hutchison, a local architect, he went to the more eminent firm of Honeyman and Keppie as a draughtsman while studying part-time at the GSA, then housed in rooms above the McLellan Galleries in Sauchiehall Street, just round the corner from the current ...”

“... at him. The idea was conceived as a revisiting of a book by one of Parr’s photographic heroes, John Hinde. Hinde’s Exmoor Village, published in 1947, was a study of Luccombe, but that had already, in a sense, gone. It now belongs to the National Trust and so, Parr concludes, is ‘completely stuck in the past’. He went to Chew Stoke instead. It had ...”

“... 13th century, and some of London Zoo’s first residents came from the Tower of London, where King John employed lion-keepers as early as 1210. John moved the royal menagerie from Woodstock Palace in Oxford; it had been formed a century earlier by Henry I, probably as a hunting reserve. The London menagerie began to flourish ...”

“... Gesina; Rembrandt had Saskia and Hendrickje; and at least one prominent Vermeer scholar, John Michael Montias, has speculated that several of the unknown women in Vermeer’s paintings are the artist’s wife or daughter. Perhaps the order of things was a bit more bourgeois in 17th-century Holland: though biographical data for the Dutch are ...”