“... in Europe continued to do well after the war. Nicholas writes that the director of the Tate, John Rothenstein, rushed to Paris with Kenneth Clark in 1944, expecting to find impoverished French collectors and dealers eager to sell pictures at bargain prices. Instead they found (in Clark’s words) ‘a sense of prosperity and social gaiety, which made ...”

“... Ballroom in Harlem, could be as perceptive in judging future talent, when it came their way, as John Hammond, the greatest of the talent scouts of the decade, though they ranged less widely. What the Left did was – deliberately and successfully – to bring black music out of the ghetto by mobilising that curious combination of radical Jews and ...”

“... Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock as candidates for the pantheon and some of the devotion to the late John Smith derives, no doubt, from a desperate endeavour to find a leader of note somewhere. Hence this book. ‘Hugh Gaitskell was the grandfather of Tony Blair’s revolution, the original Labour moderniser,’ the blurb begins. With Labour under Blair ...”

“... is pretentious unless you are her first cousin or something, which is the status enjoyed by John Davis. His mother was Jackie’s father’s sister, and the list of his previous book-titles (The Bouviers, The Kennedys, The Guggenheims) shows a well-developed sensitivity to the uses of dynasty. This ‘intimate memoir’ joins a seasonal shelf of at ...”

“... mention the 1860 battle (nor sub Huxley or Darwin or Hooker). Another portrait, another angle. John Collier’s 1890 painting is the most familiar image: a stiff, hard, sad old man, a man of power – he was ‘the Pope’ and ‘the General’ even before he had rank to pull. Collier was good at old men in pain – he caught Darwin’s next-to-last ...”

“... have been achieved by the transfer of skills between scientific fields: for instance, by John Maynard Smith, trained as an engineer, turning his attention to biology. But in everyday practice there are perfectly well-established methods of getting local results, and even if the results are not very exciting, they are results. It follows from this ...”

“... John Le Carré called it ‘the Abteilung’, but the real name of the East German foreign intelligence department was the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, or Main Intelligence Directorate, and the man who ran it for almost 34 years was Markus Wolf. When the Berlin Wall fell, three years after his retirement in 1986, Wolf was courted by other intelligence services – West German, American, even Israeli – who hoped to exploit his vulnerable position ...”

“... differently, and that different contingencies would not have made any essential difference. John Adamson asks: what if Charles I had avoided the Civil War? In line with revisionist readings of 17th-century history, he uses this question to make a case for the non-inevitability of a clash between the King and his English Parliaments, had he not ...”

“... 1860s, western Missouri and eastern Kansas produced Border Ruffians, Jayhawkers, guerrillas and John Brown. Pro-slavery men and Abolitionists, Confederates and Union men murdered their opponents. Unionists expelled many non-combatants in an attempt to deny guerrillas support. The Southern guerrillas rode under the black flag, slaughtering their ...”

“... fiats and a ruling-class weapon, but as integral to the contested politics of community life. John Beattie is among the finest exponents of this more historically sensitive approach to crime and punishment. His somewhat misleadingly titled Crime and the Courts in England 1660-1800 (1986) – a pioneering study of trends in crime and prosecution in Surrey ...”

“... of life.’ Barker’s precocity was impressive, and attracted the attention and patronage of John Middleton Murry, T.S. Eliot and Edwin Muir. Murry gave the 19-year-old poet two books to review for the Adelphi on the strength of some pages of diary (later worked up into the first novel) and Barker had published in New Verse, Criterion and the Listener at ...”

“... on election night. But at least when Chicago Mayor Richard Daley helped to deliver Illinois to John Kennedy in the narrow contest of 1960, it was not televised. (For those keeping track of our dynastic democracy, Richard was father to William, the Gore campaign head, and to Richard II, the current Chicago Mayor.) One pants-down scene was captured live on ...”

“... had a crush on. She throws herself on the mercy of a mad, obsessive fan. The minor story concerns John, an evil Coke-monster Hollywood film producer of huge-budget action movies. After a near-death experience with the flu – ‘His heart leapt with the knowledge that it wasn’t drugs or excessive living that had his jaws chattering like a tree full of ...”

“... victim, tethered, and ready for slaughter. In Where Did It All Go Right? Alvarez’s former friend John Wain receives the same treatment – punished for being feeble of mind and feeble of body – and there are numerous other little tussles and boasts. Alvarez is a writer who is certainly not oblivious of the extent of his own charms and perhaps he rather ...”

“... Others, such as Nelson Algren (the director of its Illinois branch), Conrad Aiken, Saul Bellow and John Cheever, had already begun to make their reputations. Studs Terkel would find his calling when the FWP sent him out onto the streets of Chicago to collect oral history. Most striking was the impetus given to the careers of black authors: Zora Neale ...”