“... 1990 and, on ‘Earth Day’ later that year, Smith announced to incredulous journalists at the Washington Press Club that GM would have a viable production model of the electric car ready to roll in three years. CARB took Smith at his word, and issued its 1990 ‘mandate’. The Board decreed that, by 1998, Detroit’s big three and Japan’s big four ...”

“... Protestantism that had made too many compromises with the modern world. More than a decade later John Gray, disillusioned with Thatcherism, proposed post-liberalism as a new path; more important, the English Anglican (leaning heavily Anglo-Catholic) John Milbank radicalised the theological project, breaking with liberal ...”

“... he died (now, after years in the conservation studio, back on display in the National Gallery, Washington). It is illustrated in colour in Goffen’s book; there is a detail, as well, showing how worn and damaged the painting is, but also how many exquisite passages remain. Hair is no longer conceived of as finely-fashioned wire, but as soft and flowing ...”

“... cultural ascendancy was beginning. These artists – George Luks, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, John Sloan and George Bellows – had all (Bellows apart) started out in the 1890s as newspaper sketch-artists in Philadelphia. Drawn together by the magnetic preaching of Robert Henri, a slightly older painter who had returned from art school in Paris to his ...”

“... Center has gone, and that others might be coloured by the emergence of the anthrax threat and John Ashcroft’s rise to power. It must have been tempting to introduce a phoney topicality, but with ‘so much fresh outrageousness being manufactured daily’, Franzen allowed himself only ‘minimal tinkering’. For Foden, the difficulties were more ...”

“... rolling, its farmland is welcoming, its mountains aren’t steep enough to be awe inspiring. Even Washington Irving’s famous Headless Horseman is swaddled by the name of his home in Sleepy Hollow. Roughly an hour or two from New York City, depending on how deeply scenic you want your trip to be, the Hudson Valley feels like a reassuring antidote to the ...”

“... John Stuart Mill labelled the Conservatives ‘the stupid party’. They have certainly been stupid since 1997, and one wonders if their stupidity will persist. But a related and more interesting question is: ‘Are the Conservatives any longer a serious party?’ A serious party can be one of two things. It can, like the Greens, be concerned with only one issue or one group of issues ...”

“... the only reason he was feeling better, however. On holiday in Corsica with his Harvard friend John Edsall in spring 1926, he took to reading Proust, and fastened on a passage from A la recherche that released him from his feelings of self-contempt by acknowledging the pervasiveness of human moral frailty – especially the ‘indifference to the ...”

“... racist and sexist prejudices, crowning them with a volley of insults against his former beloved John Major. Evans’s outburst coincided with one from Lord Tebbit, another former MP who made a fortune from privatisation – in his case by joining the board of British Telecom, which as Secretary of State for Industry he had privatised. Tebbit’s target was ...”

“... was: ‘Gentlemen, the Times is printed – by steam.’ The year was 1814; the proprietor was John Walter II; the new technology was the Koenig steam-driven press capable of over a thousand impressions an hour, against the 250 impressions which was all the old Stanhope iron press could manage; and his tactic of secrecy and confrontation (he was frightened ...”

“... In​ the TV drama Bad Sisters, set in Dublin, four sisters conspire to murder their brother-in-law John Paul, an abusive monster who is married to their beloved sister, Grace. The dynamics of the marriage are clear from the pilot. It’s Christmas Day and tradition has it that the siblings meet at Forty Foot – a swimming spot just south of Dublin – for a dip ...”

“... It has become the party of wars and jails, and its moral physiognomy is captured by the faces of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, faces hard to match outside Cruikshank’s drawings of Dickens’s villains, hard as nails and mean as dirt and with an issue still up their sleeve when wars wind down and the jails are full: a sworn hostility towards immigrants ...”

“... Not one of the 28 ministers saw fit to consider the hypocrisy of their position. Their ally in Washington had been bombing targets in Syria for more than a year without UN Security Council authorisation. France had started doing the same two months earlier. The Cameron government in Britain was impatient to follow suit. No one seemed to notice the double ...”

“... all who promoted evil in this country.’ We were at Mar-a-Lago for the premiere of a film about John Eastman, one of the lawyers who tried to overturn the 2020 election results. Buses were bringing in guests from the Hilton West Palm Beach; ‘red-carpet opportunities’ with Rudy Giuliani had been advertised. The film came out on the anniversary of the ...”

“... the effect as Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, and reports from sufferers abounded. The following year John Olney of Washington University set out to confirm these findings under laboratory conditions. His experiment involved injecting newborn mice with monosodium glutamate, and the results were alarming: the effects on the mice ...”