“... an argument with the trainer, who told him that with his attitude ‘the founder of the police, John Peel, would have been ashamed of me.’ Everyone laughs and Jim continues: ‘So I said to her: “John Peel – what? You mean the dead disc jockey?” And then I said: “Don’t you mean Robert Peel? Cos if it was ...”

“... aren’t always distinguishable from those who proclaim the gospel of ‘The March of Mind’. John Elliotson, a professor at the University of London, wanted to improve the practice of medicine, but thought this could be done partly by the use of mesmerism, and was exposed in the Lancet as a fraud – or possibly a dupe – in 1838. The high-minded ...”

“... were projecting a 50 per cent increase in the infant mortality rate. In a later memoir, John Maynard Keynes attributed the prolongation of civilian punishment to a cause inherent in bureaucracy. The blockade had become by that time a very perfect instrument. It had taken four years to create and was Whitehall’s finest achievement; it had evoked ...”

“... even though he was already engaged to the beautiful 18-year-old Elaine Orr, whom John Dos Passos described as a ‘poet’s dream’ and about whom Cummings would write hundreds of poems. Thayer was less annoyed, it seems, at losing Vivien than at Eliot’s sense of superiority. He compared Eliot the critic to a father punishing a naughty ...”

“... He doesn’t take his own advice, and he clearly suggests that some of his colleagues, such as John Darwin, have already imbibed the message of complexity, though the popular debate remains stuck in the crude old ruts. Even John Seeley’s notorious claim, borrowed by Porter for the title of his earlier book, that ‘we ...”

“... was on the point of getting betrothed when he finally premiered King Lear. (She married Dr John Hall in 1607, the year between Lear’s performance at court and its publication.) Biographers have pointed out, too, that Shakespeare had a younger brother called Edmund, who followed him to London and into the theatre business. Did Shakespeare name the ...”

“... mundane infrastructure becomes poetry. They aren’t as majestic as great masonry multi-spans like John Rennie’s Waterloo Bridge (with its demolition in the 1930s the Thames lost its finest crossing), or as Promethean in their ambitions as the great American suspension bridges, but the low curves of Maillart’s spans manage to look as if, for once, an ...”

“... The Reverend Robert Boughton, readers of Gilead will remember, was the best friend of the Reverend John Ames, the narrator of that novel, which is written in the form of a memoir addressed to Ames’s seven-year-old son, Robert, a name given to him by his father in honour of his friend. Both Ames and Boughton are in their late seventies; Ames is the still ...”

“... it comes nowhere near achieving its intended objective. In their introduction, Gary Sheffield and John Bourne summarise the conclusions that they wish the reader to draw from the text itself. Running through the charges typically brought against Haig, they acquit him on all counts. Far from being a half-educated dilettante, he was, they ...”

“... this shift, occasionally making things worse. Just before our gathering, the zombie chieftain John Howard had delivered a refulgent message of thanks on TV, making it plain his new government would turn first to workplace legislation. The aim would be reform in the interest of small business – boosting enterprise by making hiring and firing much ...”

“... It seems to be easier for John Updike to stifle a yawn than to refrain from writing a book. It is generally thought niggardly or envious to complain about a writer’s abundance (a book a year, roughly, in Updike’s case). Most novelists, it is said, would pant to exhibit such a fault. Or the case is made that it is otiose to complain about the mediocre books when there are so many fine ones; the odd truancy in a record of such inspired application is inevitable, the waterfall has its chilly underside and so on ...”

“... Mile Island and Chernobyl may have diverted attention from the dangers of fossil fuel emissions. John von Neumann, the US’s most brilliant scientific-political adviser of the postwar decades, wrote in Fortune magazine in 1955 that once nuclear power generation had overcome the design limits of older hydrocarbon plants, ‘energy may be free – just like ...”

“... of Buckingham, set off for Madrid incognito. They wore false beards, and they called themselves John and Thomas Smith. Their mission was to win the hand of the sister of the king of Spain, the Infanta María. The courtly duo were not well suited to a life in mufti. The only coins they carried were of a suspiciously large denomination. A ferryman to whom ...”

“... as the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR): in effect, the Ministry for John Prescott, whose amour-propre demands a duly sprawling apanage. Mullin goes to Fenwick’s at his wife’s insistence, and buys three new suits. Early in 2001 he moves to International Development, only to get the heave-ho after Labour’s election win that ...”

“... when he was sued by the incurably litigious Lord Alfred Douglas. Edward Thomas was devoted to him. John Masefield drank claret with him at teatime as they sang sea shanties together in Ransome’s mother’s kitchen. And Ransome took to most people; he was not choosy. In fact, he was inclined to instant and lasting hero worship from which nothing could shift ...”