“... black hair and dark moustache, produced a quirky resemblance to Lenin. Although his biographer John Bew finds the likeness ‘somewhat forced’, he notes that contemporary observers as different in their politics as George Orwell and the Daily Mail made sport with the superficial similarity. The British Lenin might all too easily have become the David ...”

“... reconstructed Eddystone lighthouse at Plymouth Hoe in Devon is indeed a monument to its designer, John Smeaton, arguably the first civil engineer in the modern sense, but it does not ‘host’ his remains. Smeaton was an eminently practical man who would have thought such an idea outlandish. When he died in 1792, he was respectably buried in his parish ...”

“... an eating insecurity, a covetous desire to earn acceptance and approval from those in authority. John Sutherland points to this paradox as the driving force behind Mary Ward’s extraordinary career. He isn’t inclined to condone the various obstinacies that made ‘The Great Mary’ (Pound’s term) so scorned among the writers who followed her. Her moral ...”

“... the wronged maid; the spirit of an evil ancestor whose painting hangs in a gloomy panelled hall; the friend or relative who is dying far away. Dickens was discussing tales told around the fire at Christmas, but similar types appear in accounts that claim to be true. In The Undiscovered Country: Journeys among the Dead, Carl Watkins tells one of the ...”

“... Mary and her sixty-year-old cousin Elizabeth, improbably pregnant, in the days before IVF, with John the Baptist. The Visitation is the Second Joyful Mystery of the rosary. For those who grew up in Catholic Ireland, it was also a cautionary tale: if it happened to them, it could happen to you. Later in the exhibition, which includes ...”

“... In later years the scene darkened. There was an intellectual restlessness abroad in the college. John Maynard Keynes appeared (from Eton, indeed, where he had been in Pop), and as a very junior fellow announced that he had ‘had a good look round this place and come to the conclusion that it’s pretty inefficient.’ Plainly, rows lay ahead, and Monty ...”

“... community. On arriving in New York, Phebe and Mary went to live with the Broadway tobacconist John Anderson, doing domestic work in exchange for their board. Later, Mary went to work in Anderson’s shop. It was here that she began to be called ‘The Beautiful Cigar Girl’ and became a well-known figure to men involved in the marketing of words and ...”

“... I saw no cowboys on television but plenty on the movie screen, from the Lone Ranger and Tonto to John Wayne, and I still have a picture of myself as a little boy in a cowboy outfit with a hat and chaps and toy pistols. It’s a small indication of how deeply influenced Cubans were by our mighty neighbour to the north, and the way the fiction of the ...”

“... From within a few weeks of its opening in May 1956, it’s been accepted that John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger ushered in a theatrical revolution. Launching both the Angry Young Man and kitchen-sink drama, the play is held to have had a devastating and irreversible impact on a postwar theatre scene dominated by winsome drawing-room comedies and witless country-house whodunnits ...”

“... Not long afterwards I looked through the manuscript memoirs of my old head of chambers, John Platts-Mills. John, now in his nineties and still occasionally practising, came to Balliol as a Rhodes Scholar from New Zealand in 1928. He boxed, rowed and through the Carlton Club became a protégé of Nancy Astor. Their ...”

“... bar a few hundred miles away from the mud-walled bar near Zaria, in northern Nigeria, where John Haynes’s poem is set. It opens with an evocative drift through the peppery air of the evening marketplace, past the stalls selling stock cubes and mosquito coils, and the smells of fried yam and charcoal fires, towards the coloured lights of Patience’s ...”

“... action, as cringing as it is brave. In Henry IV, it is the women who speak the truth: ‘No, Sir John,’ Mistress Quickly says to Falstaff when he insists he knows she has been hostess to petty crime. ‘You do not know me, Sir John; I know you, Sir John.’ As with Lady Percy, it is ...”

“... express speed to provide for his widow, and can’t stop. He is not quite the equal of my friend John Creasey, who once told me he tried to keep himself down to writing a dozen crime stories a year but found he wrote 14. The Burgess production rate worked out at five and a half novels in the pseudo-terminal year. And eight years later it was his wife who ...”

“... private life’, the life of a typical bourgeois academic, dividing his time between the lecture hall and the family home. His marriage was happy, and he cherished his only child, a daughter who was profoundly deaf but went on to be a successful artist. He was frugal, temperate and quiet. He was also a vegetarian; Einstein, by contrast, was a full-blooded ...”

“... local specialisms. Birmingham was strong in industrial sociology, and Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall had pioneered cultural studies there. Thirty-odd miles away at Leicester University, Ilya Neustadt and Norbert Elias gave the sociology department a more theoretical and international focus. Evaluation has had the effect of dispersing such centres. A ...”