“... and instinctively deceitful. When his father died in 1930, he erected a tombstone claiming that John Jesse Barnes had served the full four years of the Civil War, instead of an actual six months.Numerous friends and acquaintances testified to Barnes’s ‘complexity’. The painter Thomas Hart Benton, for instance, described him as ‘magnificent ...”

“... or Panama, Burma or Irian Jaya, there is no trace of Orientalist condescension.Lewis’s friend John Hatt, who selected and introduces these articles, hasn’t set them in chronological order. But they carry their publication dates, starting in the early 1950s. And the dates show a progression, from presenting ‘un-English’ behaviour as essentially ...”

“... victory. This was later challenged by historians on the right such as Correlli Barnett and John Charmley, who claimed that the war was a calamity for Britain, with consequences from near national bankruptcy and humiliating dependence on American financial support to industrial decline, Soviet domination of much of Europe and the loss of empire.But ...”

“... world. Why should peers and baronets be prominent in the British elite of 2024? Take Sir (Walter) John Scott, 5th baronet, countryside campaigner and snuff manufacturer (‘chairman of Sir Walter Scott’s Fine Border Snuff, 2012-, chairman of North Pennine Hunt 2008-’). Google suggests that Sir John is a rather small ...”

“... button. Similar personalised emails were sent to dozens of Democratic staffers, including John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair. Podesta’s assistant forwarded the email to his IT officer, who replied that it was ‘a legitimate email’. He later claimed that he had meant to write ‘this is not a legitimate email.’ But the damage had been ...”

“... grudges, he now sometimes takes part in respectful online discussions with former enemies such as John McDonnell, who stood against him for the Labour leadership in 2007. This relatively short biography devotes four chapters to Brown’s life after Downing Street. Here, as throughout the book, the tone is occasionally critical but essentially ...”

“... more directly answerable to the Crown and monarchy raised to a new level of adulation.That​ John Watts’s The Wars of the Roses: A Medieval Civil War is different from other books on the subject is clear from its subtitle. Watts’s intention is to tackle the wars diachronically, as an exercise in comparative history in which evidence from a civil war ...”

“... noted mechanist philosopher and musicologist), by the chief architect of the Royal Society, John Wilkins, and by John Locke. For Mersenne certainty is possible only in mathematics because it is ‘a science of the imagination or of pure intellect’. But since we cannot penetrate the nature of bodies and what occurs ...”

“... a sadistic buffoon and could never have been tolerated even by the long-suffering Labour Party. John Wheatley was the intellectual and organising genius behind the Clydesiders, but you have only to watch the surviving newsreels to see why Maxton had to be the leader of that group, and you only have to study Maxton’s confused utterances to see how he could ...”

“... as if she thought Catholicism were the special property of the Poles. The pontificate of Pope John Paul II has rather encouraged this proprietorial attitude. It is certainly impossible to exaggerate the contribution of the Pope, and especially of his triumphal return to Poland after his election, to the resurgence of national spirit and the success of ...”

“... but of cleaned-up versions (those corrected for faulty information, for instance, or purged, as John Harsanyi requires, of ‘sadism, envy, resentment or malice’). Finally there is abstraction: the tendency to ignore as of secondary importance the practical application of the theory, particularly by asuming that the preferences on which utilitarianism ...”

“... that perhaps only a Russian historian could write. The last two chapters are devoted to Germany. John Connelly looks at a cache of letters to the local leadership of the Nazi Party in Eisenach, and illustrates once again how diverse were the concerns articulated. Soldiers wrote from the Front, for example, to complain on behalf of their wives. And he has ...”

“... any definition.’ Newton is enlisted into the gay fraternity, partly on the fictional evidence of John Barth’s Sot Weed Factor; Gray is ‘clearly homosexual’; Akenside is ‘exclusively homosexual’; and Handel is declared ‘more homosocial than the norm for the age’. As Rousseau extends his list to include Burke, Smollett, Cleland and Horace ...”

“... none is really among the writers associated with the more radical forms of ‘Post-Modernism’. John Fowles and Iris Murdoch are not discussed. Parrinder himself notes that ‘postmodernists such as Pynchon, Vonnegut, Brautigan, Barth and Barthelme’ are most usefully understood in relation to the revival of fantasy: but that is virtually the last we hear ...”

“... suddenly that Germany was not the peaceful country he had long supposed, but one run by Junkers? John Grigg, whose work receives all too little recognition in this book, has pointed out that Lloyd George’s sympathy with France was nothing new. He had shown it 13 years earlier over Fashoda. The new revelation concerned Germany. In Professor Gilbert’s ...”