“... 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 ...”

“... there would clearly be consequences. Before the Chilcot Report was published I interviewed Sir John Holmes, who in 2002 and 2003 was Britain’s ambassador in France. He told me there was ‘a lot of unease’ in the FCO about an invasion. ‘For example,’ he said, ‘I wrote privately from Paris to the permanent under-secretary saying I was very worried ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and the like. I blame the memory of frilled and succulent Triffids in a television adaptation of John Wyndham in the early 1980s.) But what if these aversions turned more physically insistent and unsettling? Imagine a world in which the mere sight of a pen or pencil triggered a pricking of your thumbs, in which you felt fork tines rip your flesh from across ...”

“... who showed themselves to be the intellectual heirs of the didactic Victorian tradition. John Berger, in the New Statesman, complained that the show demonstrated that ‘industrial capitalism has now destroyed the standards of Popular Taste and substituted for them standards of gentility, Bogus-Originality and competitive cultural ...”

“... 1760s, conceals beneath its plump spout a delicately painted ‘45’ in reference to Number 45 of John Wilkes’s Radical paper the North Briton, which attacked Lord Bute’s ministry as ‘the foul dregs of power, the tools of corruption and despotism’. The issue was ordered to be burned, with the usual consequence that everybody heard about it. Benjamin ...”

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

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”