“... But parties did quickly emerge, producing strange electoral results. The electors in 1796 chose John Adams, a leading Federalist, for president. Jefferson, his Republican rival, came second, becoming vice president. Four years later, when Jefferson again sought the presidency, Burr became his running mate. A few Republican electors were supposed to cast ...”

“... decadence, and can’t be understood through the writings of Fabian intellectuals or the plays of John Galsworthy.Heffer isn’t interested in new scholarship on the period unless it’s biographical. Hardly a page of this book is informed by developments in historical thinking since the 1970s; he makes his case using whatever materials come to hand most ...”

“... and annoyed to be asked to write the official biography. It was largely due to his brother John, the art historian who became director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, that Pope-Hennessy was persuaded to take the commission. Royalty, John argued, was ‘an endangered species’ and this was an opportunity to examine ...”

“... of their duties as wives and mothers. An almost comically ambitious example is the Venetian monk John the Carthusian’s Decor puellarum (‘Ornament of Girls’). Writing in the late 15th century, John belonged to the most austere of religious orders, which nevertheless specialised in spiritual direction of the laity. The ...”

“... Stevens was depicted by earlier historians as ‘the crippled, fanatical personification’, in John F. Kennedy’s words, ‘of the extremes of the Radical Republican movement’. Today, he is admired for his fierce commitment to racial equality, which long preceded the Civil War. As a delegate to the 1837 Pennsylvania constitutional convention, Stevens ...”

“... was shot down in a Sochaux café. A double agent known as Max Foret betrayed the wireless operator John Young and the courier Diana Rowden (he was shot at Mauthausen; she met a dreadful death at the Natzweiler camp in the Vosges hills). Of the 12 agents who worked most closely with Harry in those few months, only six survived. And he came to suspect that his ...”

“... friend of Lamb, Hazlitt and, until they quarrelled, Haydon, was the editor of the London Magazine, John Scott. Scott was challenged to a duel after publishing an attack on his Tory rival Blackwood’s and killed in the resulting shoot-out at Chalk Farm. Leigh Hunt went to prison for libel. Everybody knew someone in prison for debt. Called away from a sitting ...”

“... lotion and so on and on – iconic terrorist, iconic toaster, iconic Toby jug … They anticipate John Grindrod’s Weltanschauung. There is very little he sees that can’t have ‘iconic’ attached to it. As he wanders through the places created in the nearly five decades since Thatcher decreed the right to buy he finds the iconic everywhere. He sees it ...”

“... Her account supplements the existing European language scholarship on the Macartney saga by John Cranmer-Byng, Alain Peyrefitte, James Hevia, John Watt and others, redirecting our attention to those who did the real work of communicating.The Chinese world order (or ‘tributary system’) that Macartney sought to ...”

“... babies came from were told that they popped out from their mother’s armpit. In the 18th century, John Hill wrote that ‘whenever we read of Virgins got with Child by Rivers, by Dragons, by golden Showers, &c’ we ought to be sceptical. It was really ‘Wind, nothing in the World but Wind’. There was the prosaic business of making a baby – everyone knew ...”

“... biography that navigates the relationship between Jews, art and money in the years around 1900.John Singer Sargent seems to be in fashion: his ‘dollar princesses’ are on display at Kenwood House (until 5 October); his early years are the subject of a major show at the Musée d’Orsay, opening this month. For a long time, however, his work provoked ...”

“... cult classic – written outside contemporary academic protocols, a throwback to something like John Livingston Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu or Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael (an influence Howe acknowledges). It’s an unorthodox close reading of ‘My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun’, which encompasses, among other things, the American Civil ...”

“... as if anxiousGraham’s poetry is sedimented with literary allusion. There’s a nod to John Donne in the epigraph to ‘All’; elsewhere, in ‘Cryo’, lines from The Shewings of Julian of Norwich make those punctuating arrows yet more strange; Emily Dickinson’s meditation on grief and form in the poem beginning ‘After great pain’ is ...”

“... He had one illusion – France; and one disillusion – mankind, including Frenchmen.’ John Maynard Keynes’s description of the political philosophy of Georges Clemenceau, who led France through the end of the First World War, applies even more to the country’s most illustrious leader of the 20th century, Charles de Gaulle ...”

“... so devoted to ideals of womanly self-abnegation. After reading this book, and after revisiting John Sutherland’s biography of Mrs Humphry Ward, I felt the need to remind myself of John Stuart Mill’s incisive argument for women’s emancipation. Mill was as certain as the next suffragist that gender equality would ...”