“... 23 months, yet in March when the tremendous blow strikes, the news that somehow or other, while in John Stuart Mill’s care, his just finished first volume, which pleased him ‘better than anything’ he had ever done, had been used as kindling, he and Jane respond without bitterness and with total courage to the emergency. As Carlyle sets out to write a new ...”

“... publicists like G.H. Lewes or G.J. Holyoake, or even established writers like Carlyle or John Stuart Mill, had limited means and little patronage. But most new arrivals found that their heroism on the barricades or their daring escapes meant nothing: ‘these people’, wrote Amalie Struve from ‘the gloomy banks of the Thames’, ‘do not know our ...”

“... inventive faculty is always glad of a reality-principle, no matter how earthy or matter-of-fact. (John Ashbery’s poem, ‘My Erotic Double’, is an interesting variant of this theme.) The Death of the Body ends with a telegram informing Uta of the fate of two of the characters – and it is striking how little we suddenly find we care about any of ...”

“... reader. Duckworth have printed it in type about one size smaller than that of a Janet and John reader, and sub-titled it ‘one woman’s haunting psychiatric odyssey’. Morton Schatzman, who is the author of an interesting book on the 19th-century lunatic Daniel Schreber, has written it in fruitiest Reader’s Digestese, replete with remarks I doubt ...”

“... in logic and mathematics became known to the British mathematician Max Newman, and to the great John von Neumann in Princeton. He already speculated simultaneously on the foundations of mathematics, in Hilbert’s and Gödel’s sense, and on the conceivable capacities and limits of computing machines, and this combination of interests was his genius. He ...”

“... credit for what comes out of his laboratory. The Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin went to John Macleod and Frederick Banting, whereas it was Banting and Charles Best who did the critical experiments, and James Collip who extracted the insulin; Macleod was the lab chief. Since even scientists themselves have difficulty in accurately assigning credit ...”

“... ourselves too seriously. But for all the wisecracking, Fussell is right to quote also, as he does, John Adams in 1805: ‘The rewards ... in this life are esteem and admiration of others – the punishments are neglect and contempt.’ Or as John Locke had put it already, ‘the principal spring from which the actions of men ...”

“... of Modern Art in New York has started to issue a series called Studies in Modern Art, edited by John Elderfield (who was born in Middlesbrough and is another veteran of the Conceptualist/Modernist art school battles of circa 1970). The first of them, American Art of the 1960s, contains seven essays and is like a heavily illustrated, hardback academic ...”

“... of notice. Her autobiography, A Servant of the Queen, stops around the time of her marriage to John MacBride in 1902, when she was 36. (The queen in question is of course Cathleen ni Houlihan, not Victoria.) There are two biographies, by Samuel Levenson (1976) and Nancy Cadozo (1977), and, like the excellent notes and introductions in the present ...”

“... McEwan, I tried to call you on the radio telephone, when our old flatmate, John Webb, fell overboard in a gale off the coast of Long Island a few years ago and was nearly swept south to Bermuda. But the old Oxford number had been disconnected, and your publisher told me that you were ‘indisputably a hugely important literary phenomenon’ and not taking any calls ...”

“... Denis Thatcher is entirely inventable – as John Wells understood: he comes in a flat pack with easy-to-follow instructions, all the components familiar general shapes, all parts from stock, no odd angles, no imagination required. When they came up with the idea for Ikea, they used Denis Thatcher as the prototype ...”

“... boasted about their powerful contacts in the Tory Party and the Government. Greer even mentioned John Major as ‘a close friend’. The programme-makers arranged further such meetings, one in a Spanish castle, to which Greer was asked to invite his contacts. Greer’s network of helpful politicians was about to be exposed when Central Television and its new ...”

“... challenge to the orthodoxy’ of classical writing in this country has come, so she claims, from John Henderson – an Oxbridge man, in one way or another, for most of the last thirty years. Helpfully (‘in case you are not familiar with John Henderson’s approach’), both she and Martindale quote extensive passages of ...”

“... represent this contribution. Boy George and Marilyn are deemed worthy of over twenty pages. Elton John is represented by an account of the rent-boy allegations made in the Sun, Derek Jarman is dragged in to reminisce about swinging in San Francisco and NYC, and out of all the British bands to make their mark in the last four years (the Stereo ...”

“... here in which Willy Brandt writes without caution or inhibition. Some clever portraits occur: John Kennedy and Franz-Josef Strauss. In the Sixties, many democratic-minded Germans threatened to emigrate if Strauss ever returned to power, but Brandt understood his combination of piercing, analytic intelligence with fatal thuggery in practical politics. It ...”