“... from the belatedly respectful capitalisation of ‘Board’) in the ensuing footnote; John Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare, is variously Clared and Fitzgibboned all over pages 602-3 with maximum confusion for readers who do not know he was both; and, as Bertie Wooster would say, so the long day wore on, so to speak. Occasionally the text is in flat ...”

“... dress suit. It might almost be mistaken for the dénouement of an early Sherlock Holmes story: Dr John H. Watson describing the scene in an East End police station when Holmes literally unmasks the man with an old scar running across his face from eye to chin which turned up his lip into a perpetual grimace, a ‘crippled wretch of hideous aspect’ who hid ...”

“... of his great friend, Bevan, quotes this passage from an obituary of Gaitskell, written in 1963 by John Strachey, who had strong relations with both men and who attended, as they did, the weekly dinner given for a small group of ministers by Stafford Cripps. Bevan, writes Foot, ‘would give Gaitskell a verbal lashing, and Gaitskell would reply with cold ...”

“... ability to convey the sense of intellectual excitement generated in an age that had one thinker, John Scottus Eriugena, who has attracted the attention of both Helen Waddell and Leszek Kolakowski. The book fails to convey a sense of change in this period, a period that Marc Bloch took as the starting point for his great analysis of Medieval society. With Mr ...”

“... really work: readers are not going to do the necessary regression analysis to make sense of it. John Curtice and Michael Steed also produce an immensely careful and laborious analysis of constituency results, their main conclusion being to confirm that the economy was not the master issue which moved the electorate. The Norris and Gavin volume contains a ...”

“... of its maturity’, without trying to find validation for that style in personal tragedy, as John Berger apparently did. For Berger, Hyman writes, ‘the late nudes were the sole redeeming component in an oeuvre otherwise “intimate, contemplative, privileged”; it was the “tragedy” of his relationship with Marthe that “ensured his survival as a ...”

“... is poignant and strong. There is a slight wobble of intention evident in the blurb of and John Wain’s own prefatory note to Where the rivers meet. The blurb calls it ‘the first of three projected books on the life of Oxford from the 1930s to the present day’, while Wain writes ‘the fact that its narrative ends at 1933 does give me the option ...”

“... obsession with masculinity from James Fenimore Cooper through Owen Wister, Zane Grey and John Ford to Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah. His subject is the well-known tautology that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. For Mitchell, the Western novel is essentially theatrical – a stage on which male identity is enacted, as well as a form of ...”

“... revolutions, is to reassure yourself that it isn’t feasible. Otherness turns out to be bogus: John Kirkby’s The Capacity and Extent of the Human Understanding (1745) presents us with a noble savage on his paradisal island who has figured out more or less the whole of English 18th-century religion almost down to country parsonages, simply by attentively ...”

“... who also had royal blood. Surrey was unimaginably grand, but was also not unjustly described by John Barlowe, Dean of Westbury as ‘the most foolish proud boy that is in England’. His actions often tread the dividing line between brattishness and defiant aristocratic singularity. In March 1543 he was hauled up before the Privy Council for having eaten ...”

“... In the massive, magisterial The Best American Short Stories of the Century edited by John Updike, Flannery O’Connor is included with one of her much anthologised stories, ‘Greenleaf’, while McCullers and Capote are not only absent, but their absences have gone unremarked by reviewers. Fifty years ago, such a state of affairs would have been ...”

“... posthumous progress through the collective psyche of her country’. Historians, beginning with John Foxe and William Camden in her own time, and extending across the centuries to Patrick Collinson and David Starkey in our own, have examined Elizabeth’s reign from a variety of angles, analysing its various subtle strategies and compromises, attempting to ...”

“... fever’, or the effects of altitude on people’s judgment. Even before the summit bid, John Noel, the cameraman on the 1924 trip, claimed that Mallory’s obsession with Everest amounted to mental illness; against which was the fact that Mallory had a wife and three small children, and had just moved house and begun a new teaching job in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... book would have been unputdownable. He corresponded extensively with Pope and Richardson. He gave John Gay a job on his periodical The British Apollo when the future Scriblerian was newly arrived in London from Devon, and was an early and influential advocate of the Scottish poets Mallett and Thomson (the bardic conception of the poet’s role elaborated in ...”