“... he might be the author of books on dynamic thinking: he was a 19th-century French philosopher. John Lancaster Spalding, with 52 entries, turns out to have been a 19th-century bishop of Peoria. Even some of the British names are none too familiar. Sir Arthur Helps, with 33 extracts from Essays Written in the intervals of Business, was – but, of course ...”

“... Pavements considerably, all the while enjoying a well-rounded private life: after an affair with John Gilbert, she took up with young buck Gary Cooper ... You can feel Nemesis coming on with every drop of a name. Sure enough: Her bedroom was chock-a-block with gardenias and tuberoses; it glowed with the flicker of several dozen candles. In this shrine to ...”

“... hard at work in August 1980 when the immaculate Cecil Parkinson visited Videla in Buenos Aires. As John Simpson and Jana Bennett of the British Broadcasting Corporation relate in their excellently-researched but somewhat inhibited book, the one-time Secretary for Trade and Industry had brought two messages for leaders of the Junta. The first was that Britain ...”

“... over the past decade, and a selection, entitled Severe Joy, is listed for publication next year by John Calder. They abound in fantastic, and often very funny, descriptions of the people he disapproves of (such as Mrs Thatcher, Enoch Powell, Ian Paisley, the Royal Family and Jesus Christ) engaged in eccentric forms of sexual intercourse. One might almost ...”

“... others only to learn.’ He does not take the analogy further, but it is worth remembering that John Stuart Mill, precociously crammed with learning which he had to dispense to his brothers, achieved philosophy and personal maturity only at the cost of successive mental breakdowns. John Mill’s progression from the ...”

“... to a point a skilled and pleasurable bit of trend-watching in the social and political milieu of John Strickland, a barrister with a distaste for his profession. The distaste is not exceptional, for among the still rich and the newly successful self-mistrust is a norm, and a well-fed and well-upholstered lack of confidence has been absorbed into their ...”

“... Secondly, there were transcripts of conversations between Callas and the American music critic John Ardoin; and thirdly, the desolate tapes she made all alone in the last years of her life. Miss Stassinopoulos jogs doggedly through every step in Callas’s career, an exhausting business in view of the singer’s shuttlecock existence: one can’t blame her ...”

“... though some very old person today were to remember having met in childhood a person who had seen John Milton’. But we need not suppose that Lyttelton misunderstood what he was being told. Belloc, he recalls, was busy being ‘great fun’. And mere truth came a poor second to immediate effect with Belloc, whether he was setting out to entertain in company ...”

“... an escalation, even if they acquired the weapons that many in the West would like to give them? If John Griffiths’s book on Afghanistan is to be believed, the convoy major’s assessment of the Afghans contains some truth. Among the Pathans, Mr Griffiths tells us, ‘generosity and nobility of manner can yield to the most scathingly expressed form of ...”

“... thought to be in the same class as oneself. Reviewers solved their problem in various ways. John Carey, in the Sunday Times, explained first that whoever thinks there is anything in structuralism except one or two points that are already obvious is in need of ‘sedation and devoted nursing’. Lodge, however, is not your wilder type of ...”

“... us of the aphrodisiac reputation of turnips, carrots and onions: in contrast to lettuce which, as John Evelyn believed, upheld chastity, though possibly not in rabbits. The vegetable revolution was assisted by the post-war travel boom which enabled housewives to see what was cooking in the vegetable pots of Europe. But, if Mrs Grigson is right, it is the ...”

“... be traced as an influence in Nathanael West and Malcolm Lowry, and her sort of Gothic fantasy in John Hawkes. In spite of this, when her books reappear it doesn’t seem to be so much in response to a public demand as because the time has come once again for a reappraisal. Has she a place of her own, in or outside the Modernist movement? I don’t think ...”

“... care for everyone. Join her. Join Bill. We can make the future. I remember how I felt listening to John Kennedy’s inaugural address as a 12-year-old schoolgirl. I was excited but anxious, aware that I was too young. It wasn’t yet time for my generation. Perhaps it would be time now. Embarrassed by my reverie and my emotion, I pull myself back to the ...”

“... when cultural imperialism among publishers seems to have demanded the exclusion of Gaelic verse. John MacQueen and Tom Scott, who edited the 1966 Oxford anthology, were aware of the lack of Gaelic and squirm a bit in their Introduction. When Penguin had Tom Scott edit their Scottish anthology (published in 1970) again there was no Gaelic. Recently, Penguin ...”

“... the United States of America is suddenly a possibility. The aged President Kennedy (Joseph P., not John F.) plans to fly to Berlin for a summit meeting. Since all this is conjecture as to how things might have turned out, it can only be assessed against your own, or other people’s, conjectures. The two best-known novels based on the premise of a German or ...”