“... Why is it,’ asks the mathematician John Allen Paulos in his book about the pitfalls of innumeracy, ‘that a lottery ticket with the numbers 2 13 17 20 29 36 is for most people far preferable to one with the numbers 1 2 3 4 5 6?’ It is not an easy question to answer. All lotteries, after all, rely on a recognition by those who participate in them that the winning numbers are chosen at random, if only so that the participants can feel that their numbers have as good a chance of coming up as any others ...”

“... Sue Slipman, Polly Toynbee and Rosie Barnes among them – but even such a seasoned campaigner as John Cartwright. One reads their names and wonders how true believers in Elmer Gantry felt when the charisma wore off.Crewe and King talk of the Gang of Four in almost hushed tones as if they were giants still stalking the land. Yet the fact is that their ...”

“... looked like, to those who saw it anticipated all around them. Other essays in the first half (‘John Donne: “Farewell to Love”’ and ‘Jane Austen and the Business of Mothering’) aren’t about death but do explore authors’ writings to elicit patterns of feeling or of the want of feeling. Though none of this is explained in principle, some ...”

“... Strong’s own account and the version given by his predecessor, the terrifying and not-much-loved John Pope-Hennessy, in his autobiography, Learning to Look. Both directors describe in some detail the office arrangement at the start of Strong’s appointment in 1974. Strong himself bemoans the primitiveness of it all: not just ‘no direct telephone to the ...”

“... to her reputation as a great beauty. Certainly, it is not a flattering portrait, of the kind that John Singer Sargent was producing for a satisfied clientèle. If we compare it to a slightly later Sargent portrait – Lady Agnew, for example – we find the pose of Cassatt’s subject far more rigid, the costume and decor more severe; the tell-tale signs of ...”

“... had originally intended to offer the job to Sir Herbert Grierson, recent editor of the poems of John Donne. However, he allowed Lloyd George to persuade him that a post of such eminence ought rather to be a party appointment. Without doubt, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944) fitted that bill. He had worked long and hard for the Liberals in his native ...”

“... of Robin’s unconcealed antipathy.’ Cook’s other antipathies are noted, against Bob Cryer, John Prescott and Roy Hattersley: ‘Try as I may, I cannot remember what the agony was all about.’ His failed ambitions are mulled over. After John Smith’s death he considered his options and decided he did not have enough ...”

“... society that George Tomlinson (a future Bishop of Gibraltar) and II of his friends at St John’s College, Cambridge founded in 1820 – occupies a distinctive niche in British social mythology. Or, rather, it occupies several niches, according to the taste of the mythologiser. In the eyes of many of its members, looking back in later years on the ...”

“... where he could hardly bear to hear Italian spoken. Similarly, an already dicey relationship with John Foster Dulles seems to have been ruined beyond repair by Dulles’s hand-on-arm habits and his halitosis. There were otherwise unexplained enmities towards Eden throughout his career which were surely based on the belief that he was gay, but since ...”

“... of the ‘rogue state’ is a lot closer to the work of a neo-Kantian political philosopher like John Rawls than to anything you will find in Hobbes. But it is true that far from being stuck in the past, the Americans have moved beyond Hobbes, and Europe, in one crucial respect. That is in their preoccupation with the new threat posed by weapons of mass ...”

“... is the real enemy.’) But he loves Falstaff, not in the old vacant, adoring, incomparable Sir John way, but as a man with a life, and an antitype to the ghastly prince; not a character you would choose to run a country or a university, but a man of style; fat, but compare his way of talking and behaving with Hal’s and it is the prince who seems ...”

“... We think now of Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone, but the pattern can be traced back to King John, when London sneaked its own municipal charter under the lee of the barons, and even before. From almost the start, the dominance of Roman London in the affairs of Britain was a surprise, and shakily defined. But the climax came in the 17th century, in ...”

“... wisdom and triumph of the imperialist leaders and dictators of Portugal; and a new celebration by John Cann demonstrates this strange revival. But the manner of the winding-up of the Portuguese African empire, as its records prove, was in fact a triumph for anti-imperialist good sense. Whether it will be remembered as such outside (or even inside) Portugal is ...”

“... Nearby was Portman Square, another highly-sought rectangle, the contractor for which was John Elwes, scion of a family of congenital and pathological misers, himself one of the London rich. For a long period these proud squares stood incongruously on the edge of open country, highwayman-haunted. There was much to be said for a mansion in Grosvenor ...”

“... actions would, if unchecked, infect the whole land with error. Hoccleve and his contemporary, John Lydgate, occupy a pivotal position in Strohm’s account. His careful contextualisation of their writing shows how concerned poems like Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes, finished in 1411, and Lydgate’s Troy Book, composed during Henry V’s reign, were to ...”