“... sent to Lewes by his literary friends on receiving copies of his clearly lamentable novels. John Stuart Mill wrote explaining that he needed to read the book through a second time before making his comments, though meanwhile he liked it ‘on the whole decidedly better than I expected from your own account of it’, Bulwer Lytton pronounced: ‘You have ...”

“... question and her grace is hardly compatible with so low and ludicrous a subject. In Only Connect John Shearman also objects to this theory, not for prudish reasons but on technical grounds: Velásquez ‘has not given us the geometrical information that would allow such a calculation to be made’. However, Shearman feels that he does have enough information ...”

“... to signal the onset of a post-imperialist culture. The best example of this is Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale’s Unhappy Valley, a wide-ranging and masterly discussion of the colonial years in central Kenya. Both authors display an admirable erudition, Berman in concentrating on white-settler and colonial concerns and administration, Lonsdale on African ...”

“... are so fond of the ‘inscrutability’ of Japanese faces. I fear, then, for this splendid book by John David Morley, based on his three-year stay in Japan during the mid-Seventies, which adopts the approach of assuming the Japanese to be human beings, and rather ordinary ones at that. Pictures from the Water Trade is a mixture of narrative, descriptive ...”

“... their own performances, behind footlights or from Java; hence the cult of Eleanora Duse, on which John Stokes here contributes a very good paper. Shaw admired her extraordinary professional skills, but others saw her as a Prazian Fatal Woman, wishing to be scared or exalted out of their wits by her. ‘Her great discovery was probably to have found that ...”

“... and she chafed against the lot which compelled her to watch her menfolk destroying wild life. John Gore, in his life of George V, suggested that her intellectual life might have been starved and her energies atrophied in those early years. George was not a man who lightly opened a book, other than a stamp album, but his bride read to him at ...”

“... in. Trudeau, ever the master of the contemptuous parting gesture, had forced his successor, John Turner, to approve over a hundred and fifty patronage appointments among the bagmen, hangers-on and courtiers of his reign. Cabinet Ministers accused of influence-peddling were pensioned-off as ambassadors to small unwilling nations and loyal apparatchiki ...”

“... linked constitutional crisis, which forced the monarchy to call the Estates General. The first, John Bosher has told us, was the result not only of defaultings in tax payments after bad harvests but of the system itself, which was dependent upon the personal credit of innumerable local tax officials and provincial trésoriers who anticipated revenues by ...”

“... David Bindman does not think that Hogarth was joking when he gave one of his contemporaries, John Nichols, a comic demonstration of minimalism: it took the form of a diagram composed of three lines and he claimed that it contained his memory of ‘a Sergeant with his pike going into an Ale House, and his Dog following ...”

“... By the time you read me, anything might be happening. Brian Clough or Bob Stokoe or Elton John could be the new England manager, nursing bruised dreams for the World Cup in 1986. On the other hand, Sir Ron Greenwood might even now be contentedly inspecting the hotels in Bilbao, hoping to find a likely venue for the lads next summer. Thanks to a series ...”

“... are however assailed, reasonably enough, in the persons of directors like Peter Brook and John Barton whose productions are determined by Kott’s or some other’s attempts to find in Shakespeare 20th-century ‘relevance’. Next man up is Stanley Fish, author of Surprised by Sin, Self-Consuming Artefacts and Is there a text in this class? Fish is a ...”

“... occasion for a formal portrait. We hear of the florid complexions and the addiction to alcohol of John George of Saxony and Christian IV of Denmark, of the ‘mouse-coloured hair’ and shrill voice of the Elector Maximilian of Bavaria, of the habitual kneeling and hunting of the Emperor Ferdinand II, of the royal bearing of Gustav Adolf of Sweden, and the ...”

“... they produced to support their case seem comically inadequate: a self-important windbag named Dr John F. Condon, who agreed to testify against Hauptmann only after the police had threatened to charge him with complicity in the kidnapping; a down-and-out hillbilly who was paid to say he had seen Hauptmann near the Lindbergh estate on the night of the ...”

“... in the dock denies dishonestly handling the video: he says he got it in the pub off a man called John. ‘John who?’ asks prosecuting counsel. ‘Dunno,’ says the accused. ‘How long have you known him?’ says counsel. ‘Oh, we’ve drunk together for years,’ says the accused. ‘And you don’t know his ...”

“... It is no wonder that none of the particulars I have so far cited appear in Jeffrey Richards and John MacKenzie’s history, exceptionally rich though it is in station lore collected world-wide, and assiduous in its pursuit both of main-line socio-economic themes and of lightly trafficked sub-cultural branches. I claim no special knowledge of my own but for ...”