“... people think I’m a monster.’ The biography he authorised and checked – Hitch by his friend John Russell Taylor – appeared two years before his death on 29 April 1980 to contradict this idea, and, for all its blandness and sparseness of reference, brought much information to light. Its blurb called it ‘the only serious biography of the man ...”

“... registers: ‘Successful shade, accept my hand in fraternal contrition! We are druv’ to it. John Bull will have it so. Tu l’as voulu John Dandin! And his lady still more! Let us toe the line, my brothers, and invest with care. Londres vaut bien une messe.’ Then catch at your own coat-tails. ‘An unpardonable ...”

“... and redemption, of long-awaited messiahs and of betrayals with a Judas kiss. The challenge John Campbell has set himself is to write an authoritative though not authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher that acknowledges its subject’s calibre while sorting through and sifting the legends that have grown up around her. In this, the first of two ...”

“... was uneventful, ‘at least until it started to go wrong’. From articled pupil in the office of John Hutchison, a local architect, he went to the more eminent firm of Honeyman and Keppie as a draughtsman while studying part-time at the GSA, then housed in rooms above the McLellan Galleries in Sauchiehall Street, just round the corner from the current ...”

“... predictable, the first is not. Tradition has it that it was in or on Patmo or Patmos that St John the Divine saw the Apocalypse – a Greek word meaning the disclosure of long-term planning or the shape of things to come. Now there is much in St John’s Revelation that I would like to talk about, but I will confine ...”

“... My story​ will be that John Harvard gave it to me. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked, pointing at a bronze bust in the reading room where I had arrived to give my lecture, and was told that it was the university’s founder, John Harvard. ‘Damn,’ I said. ‘It never even occurred to me that Harvard was a guy ...”

“... bread were put out for the poor. Some five thousand troops gathered, on horse and foot, as Sir John Strangways, a local royalist, proclaimed the end of eleven years of the republic. A contemporary source describes a procession of ‘maidens, at least a hundred in number’, dressed in white waistcoats and led by a woman beating a drum; ‘both ...”

“... at him. The idea was conceived as a revisiting of a book by one of Parr’s photographic heroes, John Hinde. Hinde’s Exmoor Village, published in 1947, was a study of Luccombe, but that had already, in a sense, gone. It now belongs to the National Trust and so, Parr concludes, is ‘completely stuck in the past’. He went to Chew Stoke instead. It had ...”

“... and Edmond Halley, those grandees of the Royal Society, and on the other the Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, the doyen of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Johns levels the same complaint against historians of science as against Eisenstein: that they take the subject ‘outside history’ and miss the struggles, practical as well as ...”

“... links’. These were discussed in various forms by Hume, both James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill, Bain, and most effectively by Hartley. As Jeffrey Gray points out, a major impact of Pavlov’s work was to bring experiments to bear on philosophical notions of mind, rather as the great physicists have, over a much longer ...”

“... do you carry the King in a common Cedan, as they carry such as have the Plague?”’ John Evelyn, too, had a low opinion of the contraption, ‘it being held a conveyance for voluptuous persons and women of pleasure to their leu’d Rendivozes incognito’. The Covent Garden Morning Frolick (1747), an engraving by Louis Boitard that’s ...”

“... the private sector sets aside for corporate sheen, although it does have a museum dedicated to John Charnley, who, almost half a century ago, pioneered the popular benchmark of the NHS’s success or failure, the hip replacement operation. They still do hips at Wrightington, and knees, and elbows, and shoulders. They deal with joint problems that are too ...”

“... restraint. It had been quite like an SDP Conference. The depression which settled over Labour with John Major’s sudden announcement of entry to the ERM and a cut of 1 per cent in interest rates is a measure of the fragility of its confidence, however. Mrs Thatcher had shot its fox, improbable fox though it may be. Neil Kinnock was harshly reminded that every ...”

“... My friend and fellow crime writer John Creasey published more than seven hundred books under some twenty different names. (He also found time to found a political party called rather grandly the All Party Alliance, although a wit said that his only allies were Anthony Morton, Gordon Ashe, Michael Halliday and other Creasey pseudonyms ...”

“... death) did not help his case. Nevertheless a powerful counter-attack was launched on his behalf by John Terraine, and these efforts found some support among the new school of ‘War and Society’ historians such as Professor Brian Bond and the present writer, who argued that Haig’s faults were those of the old Army as a whole, and that the problems he faced ...”