“... an eating insecurity, a covetous desire to earn acceptance and approval from those in authority. John Sutherland points to this paradox as the driving force behind Mary Ward’s extraordinary career. He isn’t inclined to condone the various obstinacies that made ‘The Great Mary’ (Pound’s term) so scorned among the writers who followed her. Her moral ...”

“... she was one of four English writers selected: Shakespeare did not make the cut. And then there are John Shepery, Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, who had the brilliant idea of a poem by a man responding to female accusations from the Heroides; Sir Thomas Chaloner, ambassador to Spain, who wrote a ten-book poem on statecraft dedicated to Lord Burghley, De ...”

“... what horrors are, but not how they arise or how they might be avoided, nor who perpetrated them. John Keegan’s book could not be more different. It is a conventional, well-produced text, written fluently enough, blending narrative and analysis together – the fruit of the years Keegan spent at Sandhurst teaching the outlines of the Second World War. It is ...”

“... In his memoirs Roy Jenkins describes John Kennedy as the best President of the USA in the past four decades. It is a curious, not to say unfashionable verdict. The demolishers of the Kennedy legend have been carrying all before them in the past few years. So battered is the Kennedy reputation that it is almost time for a new school of revisionist historians to rehabilitate the myth of Camelot on the Potomac ...”

“... protector of Israel. Saddam’s War and Unholy Babylon have been put together with great speed. John Bulloch and Harvey Morris, the authors of the first book, and Adel Darwish, one of the authors of the second, all write for the Independent, and regular readers of that paper will not find in Saddam’s War much (except for the earlier history, whose ...”

“... that it is often referred to as ‘the Darwin industry’. Although based on the same sources, John Bowlby’s ‘new biography’ of Darwin falls outside the industrial mainstream. For one thing, contemporary Darwin scholarship has not usually concerned itself with conventional biographical issues. (This is not to suggest that such attention to Darwin has ...”

“... retaining it and FIFA be damned – what is this about ‘Englishness’? It is this question that John Lucas sets himself to answer, in considering the poetry of two centuries. He has one immediate cultural handicap: he cannot refrain from sniping at his own side (the English), as if to provide credentials of fairness. But what he says often seems more ...”

“... that abilities as spontaneous and exuberant as his could be kept unfailingly under tight control. John Hay commented from New Hampshire, after Kipling had paid him a three-day visit in 1895: ‘How a man can keep up so intense an intellectual life without going to Bedlam is amazing. He rattled off the framework of about forty stories while he was with ...”

“... Despite obvious exceptions – memoirs by John Stuart Mill and R.G. Collingwood, confessions by St Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau – autobiography is not a genre that comes naturally to most philosophers. The typical modern philosopher – the Kant of the three critiques, say, or the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus – seeks perfection in the composition of systematic treatises and closely-argued works of logic, not in the harvesting of personal memories, which (if one is honest) are inherently uncertain, often contradictory, and usually tinged with emotion ...”

“... good luck in having a rich Crusader uncle in Sir Robert Malory, prior of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, who led an English contingent against the Turks, 1435-8; but also his bad luck in having Uncle Robert die in 1440, before his nephew could profit from any nepotism. Personal injury, coupled with feelings of political impotence, might have ...”

“... is the prospect of a two-speed Europe, in which Britain would be consigned to the slow lane. John Major and Douglas Hurd believe Britain will be in control of the 1996 agenda, and dismiss the possibility that others any longer wish to move faster towards integration than they do. Therefore, they contend, the old model of fast and slow tracks is out of ...”

“... that they could look like each other – Botticelli’s work being unmistakably quattrocento. John Gage suggests, on the evidence of Pliny’s account, that ‘Apelles was clearly one of those rare Greek artists whose works could be vividly imagined.’ I am doubtful about this. Pliny seems to have inferred from the austerity of means the austerity of ...”

“... Industrialists, bankers, rich Tories of every description felt that the day of doom was nigh. John Davies, Secretary of State for Industry in the Tory Government and a former Director-General of the CBI, called his children round the hearth to tell them this was the last Christmas of its kind they would be enjoying together. Tony Benn, his planning ...”

“... magnificent services to Beckett’s readers over the years one would not begrudge the publisher, John Calder (‘I finally arrived at Dover last Sunday with TV cameras waiting for me, the precious copies in my car,’ he confided in the Guardian when Stirrings Still was printed there), his moment of glory.Stirrings Still, in three parts, uses the now classic ...”

“... argument for justice now are, and of how we might decide between them, owes almost everything to John Rawls. Barry, certainly, has no doubt: Rawls is simply ‘the greatest political philosopher of the century’. But Rawls’s qualities, as Barry describes them, his sense of the range of considerations, his subtlety, his sheer fertility, together with his ...”