“... had actually braved their father’s displeasure, and become an Anglican parson. After chiding John for pushing himself into the forefront of all their mother’s obituaries he has a swipe at his famous brother’s double standards: When I recall Father’s intense dislike of the Church of England and of the English public schools, and your professed ...”

“... the fatal precision of the physical sciences. This second period draws to a close with the fall of John Law and the great financial collapses in Paris, London and the Dutch cities in 1720-1. On 29 August 1728, Montesquieu visits the Scots financier in Venice and, on the evidence of the shorthand notes in the posthumously published Voyages, does not understand ...”

“... in 1907, and revivified its director, the hyperactive surgeon, health reformer and inventor, John Harvey Kellogg. Kellogg is one of those historical figures who must once have appeared larger than life, but seem strangely diminished in retrospect. His achievements – as the inventor of breakfast cereal, peanut butter and soya milk, and as a pioneer of ...”

“... a hundred years ago. These problems have also been discussed by another American scholar, the late John J. Winkler, a writer of great ability whose early death is much to be regretted. In The Constraints of Desire (1990) Winkler is mainly concerned with the position of women, but he contributed to Before Sexuality, a book of essays about ‘the construction of ...”

“... disconcerted by such friends as Paul Johnson, who believes he would now be a strong Thatcherite, John Wain, who invokes Orwell as an opponent of Arthur Scargill, or in America Norman Podhoretz, who feels sure he would be taking his stand with the ‘neo-conservatives against the Left’. The New York Tribune, Rodden notes, went further and called Orwell the ...”

“... a sense of what poems are really up to, as distinct from what critics have tried to make them. John Hollander, himself a fine poet, is such a generalist; and Melodious Guile, to my mind the best of his critical books, takes its place – along with Donald Davie’s Articulate Energy and Winifred Nowottny’s The Language Poets Use – among the very few ...”

“... demands, each subject to the law of diminishing returns. ‘Progress’ has its costs. Yet, as John Komlos argues in his subtle ‘anthropometric’ account of economic development in the 18th-century Habsburg Empire, the real point about the history of the West over the last couple of centuries is that Malthusian crises have been held at bay, perhaps ...”

“... Joe Simpson’s ‘voice’ that kept him right on his agonising descent). It is a mark of John Harrison’s quality in Climbers that he never milks accidents to produce climactic passages. Climaxes, sexual or other, are something he avoids. His cinematic eye and vocal mimicry are preternatural and enable him to be intense without melodrama. He is at ...”

“... need be is gay or considered gay, regardless of merit or interest, and it will get published. As John Weir protests, ‘if Melissa Etheridge burps, she gets covered.’ I must confess that I can tell you quite a lot you might not want to know about Etheridge. For example, I know that she wears a commitment ring on her thumb and that her partner is to have a ...”

“... job and let it take the blame for your next book? Cecil Day Lewis’s predecessor as Laureate was John Masefield, who held the post for nearly forty years without seeming to know, or greatly care, what was required of him. Masefield was in place for so long that, by the time he died, most people had forgotten that we had a Poet Laureate. Every so often, he ...”

“... Fast food can easily stand for all that is wrong with America, but that is not the way John Jakle, a professor of geography, and Keith Sculle, a professor of history, see it. The trenchantly anti-ironic Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age is the third book in a trilogy that includes a volume on motels and another on gas ...”

“... Powerlessness, his 1980 study of quiescence and rebellion among Appalachian ‘mountaineers’, John Gaventa noted that where ‘a positive self-image is not portrayed for a particular group, that group may develop a sense of inadequacy about itself, reinforced by how other groups project their media stereotypes on them’ – and he isn’t talking about ...”

“... his attacks, unscathed, protected by their own sense of themselves. It is a relief to turn to John Lahr’s Automatic Vaudeville, 15 reprinted essays written over the last decade, which go far to confirm his rating as the Leavis of the popular, largely performing arts, though this collection also includes a snatch of reportage on Dallas – at once living ...”

“... incentive to pretend that they were not fictions at all. There is good evidence, well presented by John Barrell in his dicussion of Gainsborough in The Dark Side of the Landscape, that increasing comfort was derived in the late 18th century from the belief that the hard-working, honest, loyal, loving families clustered around cottage doors which were admired ...”

“... the massive resistance of capital, labour, finance and public opinion. Unlike the Webbs, Mosley or John Strachey (in the authoritarian phase of his Coming Struggle for Power), PEP’s most outspoken planners still held to a belief in planning within an open democratic society. Yet they achieved this worthy position by evading the question of power. Power was ...”