“... presented a novelty of a still more dangerous sort, according to the dramatist and man of letters John Dennis. Heretics misconstrued religion, but did not set out to overturn the moral order. Mandeville, however, presented himself as ‘a serious, a cool, a deliberate champion’ of vice and luxury; a new kind of intellectual renegade such as ‘has never ...”

“... traitor. When he questioned the jurisdiction of the specially assembled high court, its president, John Bradshawe, replied: ‘There is a contract and bargain made between the king and his people … The one tie, the one bond, is the bond of protection that is due from the sovereign. The other is the bond of subjection that is due from the subject. Sir, if ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In Los Angeles, his classes attracted Oscar Levant, the film composer Alfred Newman and John Cage. Schoenberg lamented his students’ ignorance but was happy teaching non-musicians. (One of his students was Jackie Robinson, who became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball.) Schoenberg was far from lonely or in the ...”

“... Polis Centre spent ten years (from 1993 to 2003) charting and analysing 1035 city-states. John Ma’s book, in some respects a monumental update of A.M.H. Jones’s The Greek City (1940), draws on the Copenhagen research as well as decades of work by French epigraphists such as Philippe Gauthier and Louis Robert on the vast number of inscriptions left ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as a bit too cuddly and open, and makes you long for the days of secrecy and high adventure before John Major passed the 1994 Intelligence Services Act, which not only publicly acknowledged the existence of SIS for the first time, to absolutely no one’s surprise, but also made it subject to Parliamentary oversight. Or it may be that it strikes you as a load ...”

“... course, has promised to sort it all out. He began by asking his deputy national security adviser John Brennan to investigate why the system had failed to stop Mutallab. Brennan’s previous job was as CEO of the Analysis Corporation, a private firm which provides intelligence and IT services to government agencies. One of its past services was to build ...”

“... blue room; a Hopper of a woman in an empty theatre; Witness, a smashed face by Jenny Saville; and John Currin’s Rotterdam – pornography as Norman Rockwell might have painted it. There are installations, such as Damien Hirst’s table of surgical instruments below photographs of a smashed eye and smashed limbs. There are DVD projections and sculpture. This ...”

“... it clear what religious images should do in the world: inspire devotion and emulation. Saints – John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila – had used them as stimulants to spirituality. In Alonso Cano’s The Vision of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, the saint kneels before a painted statue of the Virgin and Child. She directs a thin stream of milk ...”

“... 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 ...”