“... density of satirical allusion. He also admitted to missing the play of intertextuality in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, a satire shot through with innuendo and obfuscation: ‘I did not understand that the Scene of Locket and Peachum’s quarrels was an imitation of one between Brutus and Cassius till I was told it.’ Nothing approached the ...”

“... England is determinedly – interminably – drab: a land of supermarket cheese counters and John Lewis carrier bags, rendered in meat-and-potatoes prose with neither eye nor time for beauty.Nowhere drabber than in A Helping Hand, which mostly takes place in a ‘featureless’ London suburb:The land that stretched around them was as featureless as ...”

“... reconstructed Eddystone lighthouse at Plymouth Hoe in Devon is indeed a monument to its designer, John Smeaton, arguably the first civil engineer in the modern sense, but it does not ‘host’ his remains. Smeaton was an eminently practical man who would have thought such an idea outlandish. When he died in 1792, he was respectably buried in his parish ...”

“... world of Victorian periodicals. Perhaps his most enduring work in this medium was his critique of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty for its alleged sentimentalism and groundless optimism, a work first published as a series of twenty ‘letters’ to the Pall Mall Gazette and then republished as a book in 1873 under the title Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.The ...”

“... turning on a pound of flesh.The pound of flesh brings us in sight of that ‘Tunne of Man’, Sir John Falstaff. I’ve been arguing that, throughout Shakespeare’s developing power of characterisation, the physical has a special place: from Crab the dog to Richard Crookback, then to Bottom, then to the magnificently delineated yet isolated Shylock, and ...”

“... pubs where ‘no one’ wants to be distracted from drinking ‘by music or women’. We have John Boyd Orr describing how he propelled selected children – male, of course – from a poor school into scholarships: his achievement leads him to comment on the ‘many potential first-class leaders and scientists’ lost to the country in ‘the poorer ...”

“... natives and said vile things about the sainted Aneurin Bevan. Dornford Yates, in short, was John Buchan with big brass knobs on – an ultra-Imperialist and a granite diehard, who seduced the public with his flashy and worthless stories in much the same way as child-molesters tempt eight-year-olds with gaily-coloured sweets. But now comes A.J. Smithers ...”

“... he took hold of my ear. I stood in the corner near the insect case, remembering my bike. I had the John Bull Puncture Repair Kit in my pocket: glass paper, rubber solution, patches, chalk and grater, spare valves. I was ‘riding dead’ – freewheeling downhill with my arms folded and my eyes shut, looking Mr Ray in the eye. Every time I looked round he ...”

“... Coldstream’s time at the GPO Film Unit was coming to an end, but his association with John Grierson had a lasting effect. I cannot remember if I became aware of the doctrine at the pub or at the Group Theatre Film School where I first heard Coldstream teach with typically paradoxical practicality. Grierson held it to be naive as well as wicked to ...”

“... that he might show signs of having been influenced by the Fugitives; indeed, the shades of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate seem to hover around many of the earlier poems in this volume, poems with titles like ‘Ladies by Their Windows’, ‘Landscape with Little Figures’, ‘Beyond the Hunting Woods’, ‘On the Death of Friends in ...”

“... challenged attacks on the tone of Sarah Palin’s campaign rallies made by the Georgia Congressman John Lewis (whose record in the civil rights movement obliged McCain to call him an ‘American hero’). Gently ignoring the question in his first answer, Obama responded, when McCain brought the subject up again, by pointing out that hecklers at Palin rallies ...”

“... of bogus erudition – the Brexit white paper was, he said, ‘the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Philip II at Le Goulet in 1200’ – and he must have enjoyed expressing his hope that it would ‘not be necessary for Her Majesty’s stay at Sandringham to be interrupted by her in person having to prorogue Parliament’. Speaking the next ...”

“... like a recognisable modern garden appear in the record. The 19th-century horticulturalist John Claudius Loudon devotes much of his work to ‘fourth-rate’ gardens, by which he meant gardens of a size he thought small but we would consider reasonably large today. His love of the ‘gardenesque’ – a great variety of plants, planted as individual ...”

“... as winning the Cold War, or the ‘war on terror’. One of the things that’s so good about John le Carré’s Cold War thrillers is their moral murkiness, as they explore what happens when the people playing the game lose sight of its ultimate purpose, as they all inevitably do, and begin to play for the game’s own sake. Le Carré’s overripe ...”

“... for a minute or two. Who is responsible? Are the bloke and the body connected? Is either of them John Bayley? Rimington is an interesting figure and an amusing journalist. She knows a good bit about spooks obviously, and a good bit about spook fiction. She can’t bear 007: Bond ‘has about as much to do with the intelligence profession as Billy Bunter has ...”