“... found itself in the ignominious position of having the highest death toll in Europe,’ John Kampfner writes in his new book, Why the Germans Do It Better (Atlantic, £16.99):Germany, having tested a large cross-section of its population, had a high number of recorded cases. But the death rate, as a proportion of the population, was tiny compared to ...”

“... the Crucifixion has been engraved, with Christ at the centre, his arms outstretched, and Mary and John the Evangelist below. When turned over and viewed through the thickness of the egg-shaped cabochon, the scene of Christ’s painful sacrifice is magnified. Depending on the light source and your viewpoint, his body contorts this way and that, and Mary and ...”

“... Towne (there are a couple of his pictures in the exhibition, so you can make comparisons) and John Sell Cotman. He took from them – or so one guesses – ideas about the relation of watercolour wash to the drawn structure underneath, and a way of simplifying landscape into a pattern. In his work for Wedgwood and in his illustrations he offered a ...”

“... wood panelling, windows and the sky beyond, than it was in the collection’s former gallery in St John’s Wood, where it reflected a glass roof. You walk into it down a narrowing, steel-walled, waist-high passage, where black oil rises to the rim and stretches out all around you. The tank is neatly tailored to follow the room’s walls, mouldings and ...”

“... When Hans Schmoller​ first saw a copy of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing – the book was published in 1972 – he hurled it across the room. Schmoller, who had succeeded Jan Tschichold as designer at Penguin in 1949, was a subtle practitioner of traditional book design. His pages were balanced, proper and elegant ...”

“... blow over. Christopher Cochran, a conservation architect, showed me a picture of the church of St John Rangitukia which did blow over. The locals pulled it back to its feet. Now wooden props like flying buttresses prepare it for the next storm.Just as England’s Navy outgrew the country’s ability to supply oak, so in New Zealand building and exports ...”

“... and park-side buildings are most generous to the changing appearance of the people around them, is John Nash. His career can be followed in the pictures in the late Michael Mansbridge’s illustrated catalogue of everything which has any claim to be by him.* He seems to have designed – in Great Russell Street – the first London buildings in which all the ...”

“... Chartered Accountants were a young professional organisation when, in 1888, they commissioned John Belcher to design their Institute on a site behind Moorgate. It is bordered by narrow streets – Great Swan Alley and Moorgate Place. The architect and the sculptor he commissioned, Hamo Thornycroft, were both members of the Art Workers’ Guild, and ...”

“... in 1998, republished after he died, he said: ‘I always had such pleasure talking and being with John [Lennon] because there was nothing that didn’t interest him, you know? He had a real appetite. “What’s that, I love that! It’s red and it’s big and I want it!”’). And stepping aside, at the end, to make way for someone who really knows how to ...”

“... the intricate and mysterious network of connections, the echoes and reflections by which, as John Hollander demonstrates in The Figure of Echo, works of literature are flexibly bound, despite all national boundaries, one to another. Such criticism then hopes to reconnect the works to a social-economic support system wherein, on new frequencies, a few of ...”

“... but useful in providing provisional relief: some of these things are finely dealt with in John Wiltshire’s Samuel Johnson in the Medical World, recently reviewed in this paper. This is yet another way of being literal-minded, characteristically Johnsonian and quite remote from anything specifically ‘oriental’. Johnson’s Orient is, perhaps ...”

“... the one hand, he was a kind of comedian, a learned buffoon, a butt for courtly wits and poets like John Donne and Ben Jonson, who both knew him well. On the other hand, he was the immensely tough and courageous traveller, whose remarkable journeys through Europe and Asia were made almost entirely on foot. This is the boast entailed in his favourite description ...”

“... among his many books, seems to give pride of place to a blockbuster history of the Cold War. Dr John Lewis, editor of the Modern Quarterly, so far from being, as Inglis would have it in one of his punchy characterisations, a ‘hard nut’ of the Communist Party, was an ex-Unitarian minister, much given to moral discourse and retaining a distinctly clerical ...”

“... years of Africa as I had months – almost After Casement’s arrest in 1916, Conrad wrote to John Quinn in New York: We never talked politics ... He was a good companion: but already in Africa I judged that he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don’t mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion. By emotional force (Congo ...”

“... cent of the population had been born in the New Commonwealth. The National Front’s candidate, John Fairhurst, had stood in nearby Hayes and Harlington in the two 1974 elections. He wasn’t standing in Southall in the hope of securing a high vote, but because the NF thought putting up a candidate there would get them publicity. On 23 April, 2875 police ...”