“... At all events, 24 pages of this self-imposed devoir were sent off each Tuesday to his friend John Johnston of Grange, a dullish youth of about Boswell’s own age, but one in whose affectionate and uncritical company he felt more at peace than with anyone. Fanny Burney, who commenced a journal at the age of 15, gave as her reason that ‘when the hour ...”

“... must have had a good deal to do with it. The phrase ‘ways of seeing’ crops up, reminding us of John Berger and his allegedly penetrating double squint. The authorial assumption which remains unquestioned at the end of the book – after 350 pages in which the word ‘spatial’ appears rarely fewer than three times per paragraph and sometimes twice in the ...”

“... revolutionary dead – has strongly Catholic roots. But the main point of the essay is simply that John Paul II entirely deserved the historic come-uppance he received in Managua. The Pope, characteristically enough, went out of his way to declare his special affection for Cardinal Obando, who has been tougher in his opposition to the Sandinistas than he ever ...”

“... riven with ideological dispute and internecine factionalism faces electoral disadvantages. As John Barnes brings out in his urbane essay on ideology and factions, Conservative ideology has rested in part on a scepticism about the adequacy of ideology itself. In this sense, neither the fervent Tariff Reformers of the early part of the century, nor the ...”

“... death my father must have been talking about and though we saw his casket and cortège and little John John saluting and the widow in her sunglasses, we never saw Kennedy dead, most of us, until years later when pictures of the autopsy were released and we all went off to the movies to see what really happened. In the interim, rumours circulated about ...”

“... In the early Eighties, Western governments, notably those of America, Britain and France, were anxious to assess the probable rate of growth and pathways of infection of Aids. They sponsored extensive sex surveys in order to find out, for example, the number of sexual partners an average male had in his lifetime and how many used safe sex. The British survey was carried out by four women, primarily trained in medical statistics, epidemiology and health care ...”

“... of his life the only significant intellectual to write to Hobbes, apart from his faithful friend John Aubrey, was the freethinker, and far from respectable, Charles Blount, whose letter is display of learning which – as Blount’s work often does – turns out to have been plagiarised, on this occasion from a manuscript by Henry Stubbe. When they did ...”

“... mother a social worker and teacher of philosophy. He went to Harvard, where he shared rooms with John Updike and married the daughter of the Harvard historian Henry Steele Commager. He never taught at smart places, however: he taught history at the University of Iowa, then at Northwestern University, and for the last two decades of his life at the University ...”

“... Spirits’. Empson’s fullest exploration of this subject remained unfinished. The editor, John Haffenden, has stitched together the various drafts that he left behind and has given the somewhat unwieldy result the title ‘The Spirits of the Dream’. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck meets a fairy in the Athenian wood and asks her where she is ...”

“... encounter with the Demoiselles because the painting figures so prominently in the second volume of John Richardson’s magisterial Life of Picasso, whose first chapter, and part of the second, are devoted to its genesis, sources, formal innovations and iconography, and the ways in which Picasso’s experiences at the time he was painting it affected its final ...”

“... about the state of society from the Bulger killing is probably a mistake. Blake Morrison has John Major in his firing line, for his statement that ‘we must condemn a little more, and understand a little less.’ An ‘epitaph to a brute culture’, he calls it. Not even his worst enemies would believe John Major is a ...”

“... be secure, he believed, so long as the Netherlands were controlled by the republican party of John de Witt, which was aiding and comforting the Puritan opposition in England. The war of 1665-7 ended in insult to the English, when the Dutch were allowed to sail up the Medway and burn ships docked at Chatham. Had the war been essentially economic, Pincus ...”

“... 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 ...”