“... unspent was left to happen as fearfully as it would.’ In the hands of such writers as Trevor and John McGahern, the short story in Ireland has made an unexpected comeback. Earlier generations – that of Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain and, before them, of George Moore and James Joyce – had established it as the quintessential genre for a society ...”

“... so sparingly, cherry-picking from already known and accessible texts. But this soon changed. John Burnett used annotated extracts to illustrate various aspects of working-class life in Useful Toil and Destiny Obscure. By 1981, David Vincent had found 142 memoirs spanning the years from 1790 to 1850, and in Bread, Knowledge and Freedom used them to ...”

“... distinct as literary criticism, architecture, social anthropology and psychoanalysis. Yet, as John Joseph’s biography shows, Saussure struggled for his entire career to systematise as general theory what he had implicitly understood and put to stunningly successful use at the age of 19: that human language is the prime abstract ‘semiological’ (we ...”

“... wager – had he so internalised what photography did to things that he no longer needed to look? John Szarkowski, then the head of photography at MoMA in New York, considered the man he had championed so enthusiastically (‘the central photographer of his generation’) wholly profligate in his last years: a profligacy that was also a symptom of a desperate ...”

“... the 1780s, when the evangelical revival stirred the Baptists back into action, Shrewton’s vicar, John Skinner, lived in Salisbury, where he was master of the cathedral choristers; he left the parish to an underling who served three livings on low pay and celebrated communion three times a year. Most of the labouring poor avoided church and resented church ...”

“... glowing in the vee of the col beneath the cloud-wrack. It is not. Instead we are given bits of John McGahern and John Nash, Neil Gunn and Nan Shepherd and Edward Thomas and Adam Nicolson, and the place itself is disappeared: ‘To my mind the Pools [of Dee] possess a near supernatural presence, recalling the dust-free ...”

“... a ship called the Zembla). McGuire’s opening sentence is an ironic allusion to John’s gospel – ‘Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe. And Pilate saith unto them, Behold the man’ – but it also recalls the beginning of the novel that The North Water most resembles, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood ...”

“... extraordinary Chinese dairy at Woburn, approached through massed azaleas and rhododendrons, and of John Nash’s elegant gallery in Regent Street with its models and plaster casts – two other buildings that no longer survive. When Pückler retells stories told him by others we begin to suspect that some scepticism might have been appropriate. At ...”

“... The mutable nature of our relationship with the past is the underlying theme of Sentimental Murder, John Brewer’s compelling and surprising pursuit, across two and a half centuries, of the events of a single evening in 1779. What happened in Covent Garden on 7 April was simple enough and largely undisputed at the time or later ...”

“... all of recorded history. Yet a remarkable number of writers persist in trying. To be fair, John Mueller, a leading figure in the war-is-dead school, does not so much ignore the past as twist it to suit his purposes. But in the twisting, The Remnants of War renders history all but unrecognisable. The result is a book that conveys a relentlessly sunny ...”

“... Halifax, a parish which from 1593 to 1623 was presided over by a hotly Protestant vicar called John Favour (who figures in the novel, although the historical person was dead by the decade in which it is set). Favour made detailed notes in the parish register about the whoring and adultery of his parishioners, and wrote an anti-Catholic polemic of the most ...”

“... appear effete and irrelevant’. Over the years, a lot of these effete and irrelevant artists – John Updike, Norman Mailer, Jonathan Franzen – have launched tirades against him. The most concise comes from John Irving, commenting red-faced and furious on live TV: ‘Wolfe’s problem is, he can’t bleeping ...”

“... pleasure in ruinous places. His novella A London Life offers a memorable dénouement in Sir John Soane’s house on Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where Woodward, who worked there as a curator, was drawn into the subject of this book. In the catacomb-like basement, crowded by an astonishing accumulation of statuary, casts and architectural fragments, with the ...”

“... its effects have survived the deepening disillusionment with the Iraqi and Afghan interventions. John Lewis Gaddis is a true product of this nationalist ideology and the imperial establishment it supports. Take this statement, from his short history of the Cold War: Americans, he writes, are ‘impatient with hierarchy, at ease with flexibility, and ...”

“... a horse-driven pump, a windmill or a waterwheel. All were tried, but problems persisted until John Smeaton and then Boulton and Watt came up with their steam engines. The company was well served by engineers, who made use of Grinling Gibbons’s Oak Room at the New River Head, and seem to have combined efficiency with longevity: Henry Mill (inventor of a ...”