“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and its sequels than it does to its Caribbean ancestry. John Blair isn’t overly preoccupied with definitions, though he is keen to make clear that the modern vampire is only one element in a pan-historical complex of beliefs. Etymology can be valuable however when tracing the transmission of beliefs between ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a clean air act, or want to commiserate about the bad weather, as George VI did when he looked at John Piper’s drawings of Windsor Castle. You are struck by the observation of things that had not been seen before, or seen rarely, in pictures: things like the backs of the South London houses where Carel Weight set odd encounters that could have come from ...”

“... Gwen John’s attic bedroom, Edward Hopper’s Sun in an Empty Room, Adolf Menzel’s open window and blowing curtain, Andrew Wyeth’s New England rooms full of cold, hard light, Hammershøi’s frugal Danish ones and Van Gogh’s narrow bedroom: these are pictures you might choose if exiled to a desert island. Thinking of the inviting effect such paintings have I went looking for them in the National Gallery ...”

“... copies of Vogue, with black and white photographs by Penn, Avedon and Horst, and drawings by John Ward, Bouché, Eric and the rest, are still my best notion of what a sophisticated magazine should look like. The Post, with its Rockwell covers and advertisements for refrigerators of giant size, finned cars, and kitchens in which slim housewives lived the ...”

“... for finding things interesting, whether he liked them or not. Writing about Frank in the Guardian, John Sutherland called him a ‘fierce reader’ and the phrase was picked up by several newspapers here and in other countries. As he himself says, Sutherland was adapting Frank’s own expression, ‘fierce reading’, which comes at the start of his review of ...”

“... played with the idea that they were pantomime villains, a bit of a joke. ‘More Woody Allen than John Le Carré,’ the Sunday Times said, while nevertheless doing its best to turn its report into the raciest of spy stories, presenting a sexed-up version of the 55-page charge sheet released by the FBI – the only actual information anyone really has – as ...”

“... the subject as the campanile that reaches up into it, and Burne-Jones’s The Merciful Knight. John Frederick Lewis, who spent ten years in Cairo amassing drawings of Oriental life, came home and turned them into images like Hhareem Life, Constantinople, in which the detail is abundant and accurate but the atmosphere suburban English. In the end he gave up ...”

“... in Amritsar. More menacingly, over 180 Labour MPs signed a motion in 1973 for the dismissal of Sir John Donaldson. Donaldson, then a High Court judge and president of the National Industrial Relations Court, later master of the rolls, had sequestrated £100,000 held in the political fund of the Amalgamated Engineering Union as a penalty for contempt of ...”

“... draws     down her funds in Girls Gone Wild. Santino’s now   a vampire (Suck and swoon!). John Hurrell receives some surprising new information. Marius makes Armand a virgin   when Armand is seventeen, and Akasha’s like, that’s so     random! Who’s your secret server? After ingesting   derivatives Magnus too becomes a vampire. Anthony ...”

“... resembling the darkling approach to the vampire’s castle in Nosferatu. The artist-filmmaker John Smith exhibits a short stick that his father used over several decades to stir paint; its end has been sawn off to reveal thirty or so concentric rings of dried paint, going all the way back to the grey-green of 1950s kitchen cabinets. This would be a ...”

“... will ‘improve cost efficiency’. Rocketship has certainly achieved that: its former CEO, John Danner, boasted of 25 per cent savings in staffing costs. There is one particular link worth noting between Ark Schools and these exciting developments in and around Silicon Valley. Ron Beller and Jennifer Moses, two former Goldman Sachs executives, have ...”

“... 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 ...”