“... 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 ...”

“... that Picasso, towards the end of his life, became addicted to all-in wrestling on the telly – as John Richardson informs us in the sympathetic account of those years (and brave attempt to defend Picasso’s late work) which appeared in the New York Review of Books on 19 July 1984. However private these sketchbooks were, they reveal, more and more as we ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... its lack of actual independence tolerable. There was only one problem: if Augustus wasn’t king (John Drinkwater translates princeps, the evasive, multivalent honorific used by and of Augustus, as ‘boss’), how was power to be transferred when he died? Much care was taken to fudge the answer. With a suitable show of reluctance, Tiberius allowed the senate ...”

“... no prerogative but what the law of the land allows him,’ he was echoing what his predecessor Sir John Fortescue had written in the 15th century: the king had no power to alter the law (that was for Parliament) or to administer it (that was for the judges). He was also reacting to what the law reporter John Hawarde had ...”

“... feral figures became our familiar louche aristocrats and sapphic seductresses, most notably in John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (the other story written during that famous summer on Lake Geneva in 1816), Keats’s ‘Lamia’, Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Groom calls Dracula a ‘brilliant culmination’ and ...”

“... 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 ...”