“... and authority of his prose.If Raymond Carver ranks among the great American short-story writers, John Barth is a master of the out-sized Post-Modern novel. They belong at opposite poles of the American literary spectrum. In ‘On Writing’, Carver mentions an essay by Barth in which the latter regrets the lack of interest his students express in ‘formal ...”

“... cold. Pepys looked at the megaliths in 1668 and shrugged: ‘God knows what their use was.’ John Aubrey, the first person to make a serious study of stone circles, put his finger on the problem: ‘These Antiquities are so exceeding old that no Bookes doe reach them.’ He developed a more effective method. Using measurements and comparative surveys of ...”

“... the pressures of a deeply unequal society released. But what emerges from the tangle of stories in John Henderson’s book is a sense that for many the world stood still during the plague. The disease waned in the early summer of 1631 and, in June, Florentines emerged onto the streets to take part in a Corpus Christi procession, thanking God for their ...”

“... of saints’ stories by Jacobus de Voragine – and the late medieval English sermon collection of John Mirk. The Orthodox Church, concerned to regulate monastic communities, severely penalised any behaviour that compromised masculine identity: shaving off one’s beard, and thereby appearing feminine, received a worse punishment than soliciting another man ...”

“... of political science in That Noble Science of Politics (1983), cowritten with his late colleagues John Burrow and Donald Winch, which rejected the notion that a unidirectional, single-subject narrative was an adequate way of recounting a discipline’s history. The authors instead immersed themselves in unresolved contradictions: between deductive procedures ...”

“... political event – a symbol of colonial exploitation and neglect. In 1861 the radical nationalist John Mitchel published The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), in which he blamed the British government for the devastation. ‘The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight,’ he wrote, ‘but the English created the Famine … and a million and a half ...”

“... lore had Warhol moving into bed with his mother while his father slept upstairs with Paul and John [Warhol’s siblings],’ Gopnik writes. When Julia moved to New York to live with her son, people ‘thought she was stupid’, a friend said, ‘but she was brilliant beyond belief … and much smarter than Andy.’In high school, Warhol was not known for ...”

“... plenty men whose heads resemble nothing so much as the head of a dick which is how I came to see John Cadmus III sitting at the wheel of his pickup truck in a parking lot outside a Safeway foodstore in Tucumcari New Mexico – he looked a tad like Norman Schwarzkopf the day he turned back on the road to Baghdad and though I spotted – or say I spotted his ...”

“... When Raymond Asquith died in the Battle of the Somme, Winston Churchill grieved for ‘the loss of my brilliant hero-friend’, and the Prime Minister’s son became a symbol of the talent of a whole generation. He is mentioned in countless memoirs, but until the publication of this volume Asquith has never possessed any definite literary personality to give documentary substance to the legend of tragically sacrificed brilliance ...”

“... publicity to my brother Stephen in some sensationally farfetched connection with Guy Burgess, John Lehmann and other names they hoped to involve.) ‘Ah that rings a bell,’ and significant looks passed between uniformed men at desks and with telephones. Our identity was doubted until Tom Hopkinson (then editing Picture Post) and the Art Editor of the ...”

“... the avoidance of these topics is due to their common subjective uses. Behaviourists, ever since John B. Watson, have been determined to avoid the use of subjective terminology, holding that this is proper only to humans. This is certainly a difficult topic, but surely if we are to see signs in animals that we classify as indicating ‘fear’, we can also ...”

“... you as a smiling machine both a purring cat and a fixture – and then in a letter rejecting John Bull’s Other Island said you had for the first time ‘a geographical conscience’ – which means your other island savoured of the earth had even the oily tremor of bogland – I guess he meant to imply that all the rest – all your other plays ...”

“... cabinet has that kind of pull, and the ones who are spoken of in the same manner – Donald Dewar, John Smith – are as dead as the Scottish kings. In the end Sheridan won his case and relieves the News of the World of £200,000. The fate of possible perjurors is still unknown, but it will be some time before the country is so riveted by a trial, one that has ...”

“... members as there had been when Blair won the 1997 election, and nowhere near the million members John Prescott used to boast of as being the party’s achievable goal. People are leaving Labour in droves. To anyone outside the present administration the explanation is simple: New Labour lies, and is craven, and has failed. To senior party figures and ...”

“... I’d like to think it doesn’t bother them unduly. As Browning put it, ‘What porridge had ...”