“... when I was the literary editor of the Evening Standard. It was during the Gulf War and my editor, John Leese, said that it would not be appropriate to hold one of the regular literary lunches, meant to be a celebratory occasion, on a morning when – for all we could predict – horrible news of slaughter might be coming in from the Desert. Instead, I ...”

“... was in Oxford when he first encountered the living dead. One autumn night in 1869, he passed John Conington, professor of Latin, staring silently at Corpus Christi College. Nothing odd about a distracted don, except that Lang soon learned that Conington had, at that moment, been breathing his last in Boston, Lincolnshire. Years later, he discussed this ...”

“... muse lets rip through the rat-a-tat of Blind Hary’s Wallace; and in the brassy Reformation of John Knox it blares even in the sophisticated George Buchanan’s over-the-top ‘Elegy for Jean Calvin’. The volume remains high in some of Robert Fergusson’s sophistic-performative street-talk, Burns’s on-off, rip-roaring ‘Tam ...”

“... Wilson replied. He later said his words had been taken out of context. Another DUP MP, Gregory Campbell, complained in February that there were too many black people on Songs of Praise. It was, he said, ‘the BBC at its BLM worst’. He refused to apologise.In January 2020, almost three years after power-sharing collapsed, the DUP and Sinn Féin finally ...”

“... he was eventually arrested, four years later, he was living in Yorkshire under the pseudonym of John Palmer. He came to the attention of the authorities only because, returning one day from hunting, he had shot a tame bird; reprimanded by a bystander, he replied that if the man would only stay while he charged his piece, he would shoot him too. Charles ...”

“... Rubio, another member of the orthodox neoconservative faction who once co-wrote an article with John McCain in the Wall Street Journal claiming that the overthrow of Gaddafi would lead to ‘a democratic and pro-American Libya’. Rubio is preoccupied with schemes to destabilise Cuba, Venezuela and Iran. As late as 2022 he was criticising Trump’s ...”

“... he crosses out the word ‘harness’. Over on this side of the Channel, the native-born author John Braine chooses for his epigraph a snatch of neo-Romantic whimsy from the lyrics of the group Supertramp: Just as long as there’s two of us, just as long as there’s two of us I’ll carry on. Mutatis mutandis, here is the same, rather deprecatory ...”

“... of Adams have been made by those who saw him working closely with McGuinness. Alastair Campbell recorded in his diaries that at an early stage of the peace process Blair asked both men whether they would be able to sign up to a settlement that didn’t explicitly commit to a united Ireland. ‘Adams was OK,’ Blair reported, ‘but McGuinness was ...”

“... pattern with Johns. About one fifth of all males in the UK between 1800 and 1850 were christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so ...”

“... way could what he termed ‘the American adventure’ hope to continue. When, twenty years later, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the first American President born in this century, stood and took the oath of office it seemed to many of his fellow countrymen that the stewardship of daring had finally found its vindicator. The great adventure was once again underway ...”

“... Donny, the mother, a role she plays with frazzled charm and confident understatement, and the boy, John, aged about twelve, is Danny Worters, whose age is not in the programme, but who manages to sound like a worried prodigy without sounding like a pain. Izzard is a bit lost between these two, trying to be laid-back but only managing to seem out of it, and ...”

“... assistant editor; I was to be Karl’s deputy. The first issue of the new paper, designed by Peter Campbell, another refugee from the Listener, appeared at the end of October; a month later the TLS was back; and the following spring the New York Review let us go our own way. The LRB became a paper in its own right in May 1980, when the first independent issue ...”

“... retaining it and FIFA be damned – what is this about ‘Englishness’? It is this question that John Lucas sets himself to answer, in considering the poetry of two centuries. He has one immediate cultural handicap: he cannot refrain from sniping at his own side (the English), as if to provide credentials of fairness. But what he says often seems more ...”

“... to give a canonical stamp to work which was more appropriately read within a manuscript culture. John Suckling’s Fragmenta Aurea appeared in 1646, four years after the poet’s death, probably by suicide, in France. Its printer places poems to the King at the start of the volume in order to make it look like a piece of aggressive nostalgia from a dead and ...”

“... had become essential to the modern electoral campaign. Everyone remembers the young and handsome John F. Kennedy’s triumph in televised debates with his rival Richard Nixon. According to legend, Nixon lost the 1960 election by his refusal to put on makeup before the broadcast. One of the more subtly interesting moments in Mad Men occurs when we see an ...”