“... irritated by talk of class conflict, and is not exactly in congratulatory mood when he calls John Carey the most class-conscious critic of the modern age. (The literary hackles raised by Carey’s recent memoir, The Unexpected Professor, which puts the petty-bourgeois boot into patrician dons, revealed just what kind of talk remains unacceptable in a ...”

“... Identity documents certainly served Reuveni’s purposes: a papal letter of recommendation to John III, the king of Portugal, when Clement VII decided not to help him further; a letter of safe conduct into Portugal (whose Jews had been forcibly converted or expelled some years before); and a royal letter of safe conduct out of the kingdom once ...”

“... learns the useful art of skipping’. Skip, then, to the moment when the American publishing house John C. Winston Company, taking Maugham at his word, hired him to demonstrate this art. Under the series title ‘Great Novelists and Their Novels’, the books Maugham had chosen were issued in new editions ‘edited by W. Somerset Maugham’ in 1948. In an ...”

“... to be looking for them, is that Stuart was looked after by a man who used to be part of my family: John Brock, who ran a drop-in centre in Cambridge as part of the Wintercomfort homeless charity. Stuart was one of the people who campaigned for John’s release after he was imprisoned, along with Wintercomfort’s ...”

“... are catalogued in The Road to Wellville (1993), a novel about the cereal manufacturer Dr John Harvey Kellogg – inventor, in Boyle’s phrase, of ‘gastrically correct foods’. He makes surreal play of Kellogg’s determination to force his guests at the Battle Creek Sanitarium to eat his nutritional products: ‘Nut Lisbon Steak, Protose ...”

“... climbed for the challenge, those who climbed for science and those who climbed to be nearer Him. John Tyndall, a scientist-mountaineer of high ideals, claimed to find moral and mystical edification in high places: ‘There is assuredly morality in the oxygen of the mountains, as there is immorality in the miasma of a marsh.’ His great rival, Leslie ...”

“... Welles to record an immediate response. Welles was the original activist-actor, the precursor of John Wayne and Jane Fonda, if not Ronald Reagan. Hoping to reclaim the prodigal for the theatre, the Broadway producer Billy Rose addressed an open letter to him: ‘Listen, Thunder-in-the-Mountains, isn’t it about time you made up your mind whether you’re ...”

“... and Christian orthodoxies informed early modern attitudes, so that the devoutly Protestant John Locke could assert on both counts that ‘labour for labour’s sake is against nature.’ There would be no work in heaven. But then in the second half of his chapter, on ‘the rewards of labour’, Thomas inverts this picture, tracing ‘the rudiments of ...”

“... A rich​ old American in John Banville’s new novel makes an amused distinction between money and small change. Asked what money is, he just laughs. This is not malevolent laughter but he does do a dangerous thing with his money. He leaves a lot of it, when he dies, to a young American niece. She is grateful, of course, and the money enhances her freedom – at first ...”

“... out ‘it was snowing butterflies,’ and such in fact was the appearance.In 1845 the publisher John Murray reissued the book for a large public. Darwin became a literary celebrity. Voyage of the Beagle (to use the title Murray gave it) is a vivid travelogue, but it also carries heavy theoretical freight. Darwin was struck by ‘how exactly the animals and ...”

“... In​ the original film noir, John Huston’s Maltese Falcon (1941), private investigator Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) visits criminal mastermind Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) in his San Francisco hotel room to discuss the delivery of a mysterious ornament. The elevator attendant points him in the direction of Room 12c ...”

“... Welsh descent and was probably educated at St Paul’s School; he seems to have known its founder, John Colet. His father was an unsuccessful mercer, who committed the cardinal sin in mercantile terms when he was declared bankrupt. Vaughan was indebted to his grandfather’s patronage for his place among the Merchant Adventurers, which led to his making the ...”

“... aesthetic excellence in the way it depicts something, we must first perceive what it depicts. And John Hyman is interested in how depiction is even possible. This question has fascinated philosophers for a long time, but it can very quickly get a grip on any reflective person. However familiar we are with the business of linguistic communication, for ...”

“... like the Ars moriendi, guiding the reader towards a good Christian death, or The Apocalypse of St John (John’s vision of a celestial battle between good and evil), or the Biblia pauperum, with images of Old and New Testament stories. Some block books were hybrid works, combining woodcut images and handwritten ...”

“... it, producing not only Rockwell, Guest and the Saturday Evening Post but also Georges Simenon, John Steinbeck and the New Yorker (‘high-class kitsch for the luxury trade’). With kitsch running wild, like the capitalism which propelled it, authenticity needed defending. For nearly fifty years, Greenberg shouldered the task, separating good art from bad ...”