“... been to her balls and stitched her way through her trousseau, was heard to wail, ‘All this, and John at the end of it!’ John wasn’t the only reason for wailing. There were always girls who spent hours at dances cowering in the Ladies, abandoned by their partners and cold-shouldered by the other girls on the grounds ...”

“... faith, the caricatural contortions of Resurrection of Soldiers only a desperate desire to believe. John Rothenstein, giving high praise to the early paintings including the splendid 1914 self-portrait that provides a cover for the biography, said much of the later work gave the impression of being stopped only by the margin of the canvas. Given another couple ...”

“... father and mother. He believes that he is the illegitimate son of Queen Victoria by her servant John Brown, who must have ‘lifted his kilt’ on some unrecorded occasion. Everywhere, on tea-caddies and biscuit-tins, he looks proudly at images of his mother’s face. Samuel believes it, but we don’t, any more than we believe Pip’s great expectations ...”

“... came, Rogin believes, in 1981. ‘To confirm the President’s faith in the power of film, John Hinckley, imitating the plot of the movie Taxi Driver, deliberately shot the President on the day of the Academy Awards.’ It so fell out that Reagan had already recorded a breezy, upbeat salute to the audience at the Oscar ceremony: ‘the television ...”

“... we were reminded of what we had known and then forgotten: that it was the birthplace of Cecil John Rhodes. Moreover, we were told that the house in which Rhodes was born had been turned into a museum. Since my wife had been born in Rhodesia, and I had grown up in Kimberley, we felt we had no choice in the matter: we had to go and visit it. To grow up in ...”

“... to hated courtiers, who would then promptly ruin themselves on its costly maintenance.) Yet John Goode notes in Women Writing that Lawrence is here unwittingly acute about something central to sexist ideology: that ‘woman is an image to be uttered’ – uttered, that is, by other people. One feature of these four books allows them to be discussed ...”

“... the Mercury astronauts: the first Americans to be hurled into space. The names of some of them – John Glenn, Wally Schirra, Gus Grissom – will no doubt sound like the music of a distant drum in the ears of older readers. In order to write about these men, Wolfe has to write also about their wives; about the corps of test pilots from whom most of the ...”

“... less grave than the anachronistic and sentimental idea, entertained by the supposedly tough-minded John Berger in his television series, that Frans Hals intended his late group portraits to expose the true horror of bourgeois society. Civilisation certainly extends our sympathies; it may deepen our understanding of European history; but it avoids challenging ...”

“... pay for a suitable room large enough to accommodate her needs,’ or Gabriel adding, ‘Perhaps John and I should talk it over. See if we can come up with a plan that will please you,’ or (about his model Annie Miller): ‘I merely want to state that I have not seen her since you came to Bath and other than inadvertently will not do so in the ...”

“... the promoters of the works included the King and courtiers, but also a local entrepreneur, Sir John Monson, while the largest scheme of all was undertaken by the Earl of Bedford, one of the leaders of the political group self-consciously opposed to other royal policies. Thus the tension appears to have arisen not from a division between court and country ...”

“... Pen, and join forces at North Berwick with his friends the Storys. Before starting, he had told John Forster that Pen and the Storys had persuaded him to this course, but that he meant to stay only a month. The friendship with the Storys was an old and affectionate one: they had met in Italy in 1848. William Wetmore Story was an American sculptor of ability ...”

“... or happy. Steedman is concerned to find this thinking at the level of daily life. She shows us John Locke writing to his Somerset friends, the Clarkes, asking advice about servants and ‘weighing up the capacities, abilities and personalities’ of the Clarkes’ maids. In contrast to his thoughts on the toilet training, washing and dressing of ...”

“... Hamburg after the war, I met a very interesting man, mentioned in these dispatches from the 1950s. John Harvey-Jones was a naval officer who talked to people as if they were all there, in a way that was strange among seniors, and he gave people books – in my case, Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters. He later became the head of ICI. I forgot to ask him ...”

“... book of first poems in many years’, Richard Howard proclaimed in 1981. James Merrill, John Hollander and John Ashbery spoke in similarly emphatic terms, while Anthony Hecht saluted an ‘extraordinarily fine’ debut and Harold Bloom hailed the arrival of a great original. ‘I think I speak for many,’ David ...”

“... harbours and through torpedo nets. Another spectacular display of effective heroism, noted by John Gooch in Mussolini’s War, was the all-out charge of the Savoia Cavalleria, the Italian equivalent of the Life Guards, when 650 mounted men with sabres and pistols broke a Russian infantry regiment some 2000-strong at Izbushenski on 24 August 1942. Sans ...”