“... pattern with Johns. About one fifth of all males in the UK between 1800 and 1850 were christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so ...”

“... oriented itself toward power, not feeling’ – such dichotomies abound, alas; that the ideology took hold, less because men were afraid of women or of the feminine components in themselves – a feminist argument that has always seemed to me persuasive – than because men were afraid of being humiliated by other men in the perfervid economic enterprise of ...”

“... to the burning sun, which sends him blind. One other scene stands out. The hero, Harry Faversham (John Clements), fears he is a coward and having declined to go with his regiment to the Sudan goes native in order to prove himself by working unrecognised to assist his ex-colleagues who have sent him the feathers. To corroborate his disguise as a harmless ...”

“... for the march.’ New York is a Democrat city, but also a famous backdrop, and the Republicans took the chance that the memory of 11 September would drown out all protest. They raised a platform at Madison Square Garden on which to parade their anger as a mode of strength; for the first days of the convention, at least, it appeared that the present ...”

“... my father, the Chinese Maritime Customs. But this work, much of it from the distinguished hand of John Fairbank, was mostly concerned with the 19th-century origins of the institution, shedding less light on modern times. For its more recent history, it was not even very clear where the records lay: the best contemporary guide to Chinese archives, produced in ...”

“... large figure paintings (including Golgotha, a shtetl crucifixion, with the figures of Mary and St John based on his parents), one enthusiastic critic said it was ‘as if by mistake, the works of a child, truly fresh, “barbaric” and fantastic, had landed there.’ When his work was shown in Berlin two years later the response was even more ...”

“... their slaves, their excesses of despotism. At the same time even a light-hearted impresario like John Rich was aiming at targets closer to home, as Bridget Orr explains in an essay on the Oriental theatre. But it was the example of Scheherazade that the writers who flocked to ventriloquise Oriental tale-tellers took to ...”

“... Why must we exist in perpetual uncertainty (only ended by death) as to whether we are well or ill? John Donne speaks of illness as an invader, which sets up a kingdom and conceals ‘secrets of State, by which it will proceed, and not be bound to declare them’. So profound are the effects of the belief that we are ill that hypochondria must be seen as a ...”

“... of brushing one’s teeth. The AA meeting room in this defeated old church stank of that terror. I took my 24 coin, the red one, plastic, out of my pocket, and looked at it in the palm of my hand. I imagined spinning it playfully on a bar, smiling at the bartender, and ordering my third vodka tonic. On Ameisen’s version of the possession view, there is a ...”

“... Trying​ to describe the spectacular summit meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I which took place in June 1520, contemporaries fell into a kind of stupor. It was the eighth wonder of the world, said one. Another thought the temporary palaces – erected at staggering expense for the sole purpose of a fortnight’s worth of jousts and junketing – outdid the ‘miracles of the Egyptian pyramids and the Roman amphitheatres ...”

“... it’s being republished now with the open aim of reaching the sizeable audience that resurrected John Williams’s Stoner and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road. All three books share an interest in sad marriages and a certain amount of diffuse self-pity, but strenuous Flaubertian realism as practised on a mid-20th-century American campus, provided in ...”

“... because a new Israeli coalition was being formed and needed time to settle in. The talks never took place. The lesson for Hamas was clear. Even if an agreement was brokered by the US and Egypt, Israel could still fail to honour it. Yet Hamas largely continued to maintain the ceasefire to Israel’s satisfaction. It set up a new police force tasked with ...”

“... that is, of a violent, apparently purposeful activity that wasn’t in any real sense planned. I took that as a metaphor for a lot of things in the Soviet Union. Hatherley has a tough-minded approach to huge empty spaces, although he acknowledges that crossing them can be daunting. He views my bête noire, the 1960s-modern Kalinin Prospekt, with relative ...”

“... is following Gramsci’s example within one’s own society.’ In 2006, again in the LRB, he took the same attitude towards Marx, suggesting that Marx and Engels’s Rhineland origins was the key to their interpretation of capitalism’s development: Marxism was ‘a Rhineland-based diversion of global history, mistaken for the mainstream during a ...”

“... thought of joint task forces, they even tended accidentally to act in concert. The adventure that took America’s marines ‘to the shores of Tripoli’ was an expedition against Mediterranean pirates that anticipated both countries’ later efforts to clear pirates from the South China seas, and President Reagan’s strike on Tripoli in 1986. When in the ...”