“... Irwin is cited in Paul Muldoon’s To Ireland, I for a neighbourly dispute he was having with one John O’Donovan. ‘He says I am his enemy,’ Irwin wrote, ‘and watch him through the thickness of the wall which divides our houses. One of us must leave. I have a houseful of books; he has an umbrella and a revolver.’ Seasoned readers of Muldoon know all ...”

“... approach to the political system and ‘modernisation’, the Blair Government is much more like John Major’s than people have noticed. The attack, both rhetorical and actual, on local government, and particularly on local education authorities, continues. Thus the fate of grammar schools is now to be decided by ‘parents’ – that is, by people whose ...”

“... teens, C.R.W. Nevinson fancied the life of a bohemian and attention-grabber. His idol was Augustus John, king of the Café Royal, and, in 1908, he decided to go to the Slade, as John had done. There he knocked around with Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth in the Slade Coster Gang. They went to music ...”

“... originally recorded’, during the phonograph boom of the Twenties. While the pioneer folklorist John Lomax remained suspicious of the new technology which made such preservation possible, his younger colleague, the composer-musicologist, Charles Seeger, took a less purist – and more activist – view of what folk music might be. Radicalised by the ...”

“... an elegant William Pitt rides the shoulders of the bloated-looking, nonsense-spouting King. John Bull, objecting to war with Revolutionary France in the 1798 ‘TREASON!!!’, farts into the unmistakably unhappy face of His Royal Highness. Like other caricaturists in the orbit of the French Revolution, Newton made scatology a subversive ...”

“... Two voices are there of Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University John Halperin, whose rank and area of operation are, by what strikes me as a publishing solecism in a book that solicits a general readership, placed in apposition to his name on the title-page. The first voice is scarcely of the deep, but it utters some common sense ...”

“... this prosopographical approach to sanctity has become more and more popular. The American scholar John Mecklin studied the saint as a ‘culture type’ in 1941. In his book Altruistic Love (1951), the Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin refined Coulton’s analysis by investigating the social origins of some three thousand saints. He concluded that ‘the ...”

“... between collective memory and conscience, and the art of the storyteller. In both Hughes’s and John Milne’s novels the haunting events have to do with Nazi Germany. Ernst Kestner, Hughes’s pork butcher, is a German ex-soldier who feels impelled to revisit the scene of a World War Two massacre in occupied France. Kestner is in his sixties and is dying ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 1934, only two or three quavering voices were raised in his defence and then were heard no more. John Payne Collier also had a few defenders at the outset of his ordeal, but after his presumed exposure was complete, no one publicly doubted his guilt, or that his purposes in committing his sensational hoax were an unforgivable breach of scholarly ...”

“... is the neophyte removing (or putting on) his shirt, who must be one of the Jews who came to John for baptism. The four bearded men in the background may originally have seemed more puzzling, since they are dressed in modern Byzantine costume of the type worn by the delegation that came to Florence in 1439 to negotiate the union of the Greek and Latin ...”

“... her ‘misfortune to suffer very great mischiefs from the assistance of architects’; Sir John Cope, of Bramshill, whose ‘apartments are so vastly spacious that one generally sees Sir John toward the winter put on his hat to go from one room to another’; John Mytton, of ...”

“... Venice is an elegant and distinguished first book. Like its predecessor The Rise to Empire, John Julius Norwich’s The Greatness and the Fall has the modest aim of providing ‘a straightforward record of the main political events of Venetian history, for the general non-academic reader’. This second volume takes the story from 1405 to 1797, from the ...”

“... infant pupils were failing to progress in reading because the imported books (usually Janet and John) bore no relation to their lives and emotions. She discovered that for each child there were certain key words related to their day-to-day lives and to their feelings. Find one of his or her key words and the child who had taken three weeks to learn and ...”

“... of his father, and for a long time relied on marginal posts (such as the Stewardship of St John’s College) in order not to have to seek employment outside the University.’ Something has gone severely wrong here: it was the father, W.H. Bateson, who never held a University teaching post, and whose one-year stint as Vice-Chancellor occurred in an age ...”