“... But the remark was not as self-deprecating as it looks. It was among other things an allusion to John Stuart Mill, who had opened his own very celebrated Autobiography with a similar disclaimer: he had nothing to offer, he said, apart from an account of the origin and growth of his philosophical convictions, and ‘the reader whom these things do not ...”

“... readers of the previous generation had addressed to poetry. He drew on eclectic older critics like John Holloway, Ian Watt and, above all, Frank Kermode – many of his circle, he reports, ‘were covert Kermodians inasmuch as we regarded him as the most accomplished literary critic of his generation’ – but also on outliers of American formalism such as ...”

“... It is John Ashbery who takes the cake – in this case, the triple-decker cake with the solitary little sugar bride on top – for his description of Elizabeth Bishop: she is ‘the poets’ poets’ poet’. It sounds farcical, but it’s strictly true, and there’s as little getting round it as there is improving on it ...”

“... be at the actual scene of the killing to be found guilty and sent to jail,’ Detective Inspector John McFarlane said after the conviction of 17 of the 20 young people jointly charged with the murder of 15-year-old Sofyen Belamouadden at Victoria Station in March 2010: ‘the law on joint enterprise is clear and unforgiving.’ To be found guilty of murder as ...”

“... connections that can entail. He has Westminster experience as a parliamentary researcher, but to John McDonnell; his parents were Militant activists and his politics are rooted in a Trotskyist version of Labourism, yet he has managed to force a neoliberal Labour establishment to take him seriously. His opinions would be ridiculed as those of a ...”

“... our obligations to suit our inclinations, rather in the way that, in Sense and Sensibility, John Dashwood and his wife Fanny gradually persuade themselves that the large sum of money John had promised to support his stepmother and half-sisters really ought, in the best interests of everyone involved, to be reduced to ...”

“... chemistry dominate both Holmes’s history and the period itself, but Holmes is interested too in John Herschel, William’s son, who nearly became a lawyer instead of the founder of the Astronomical Society; in Nevil Maskelyne, the astronomer royal at the Greenwich Observatory; in Mungo Park, the African explorer and the first European to reach the Niger; in ...”

“... It was a hard problem; but something had to be done. One of the first to look into the issue was John Locke, who had always been a committed supporter of the Revolution. After spending most of the 1680s in political exile in the Dutch Republic, he had returned to England in triumph in February 1689. William immediately asked him to be his ambassador to ...”

“... Macdonald’s advice to publish under a pseudonym. His admission drew much attention, and caused John Crowe Ransom to retract his acceptance of one of Duncan’s poems for the Kenyon Review. The essay was also notable for its earnest protest against the ‘cult of homosexual superiority’, a volley probably directed at the Surrealist Charles Henri ...”

“... thing on occasion, for all its turns and denials. Calling her ‘the leaderene’, as Norman St John-Stevas did, wasn’t candid, or apt, or funny. The old fellows were bound to wish to hit back from time to time at the Handbag, and they did manage to get rid of it, none too soon, in the end.12 April 2013 Servicemen are starting to wonder more and more ...”

“... of his research attacks the familiar claim that heavy internet use makes people more isolated. John Freeman’s polemic The Tyranny of Email cites a study that purports to show how ‘people burned up two hours a day on the internet’ that ‘they would normally spend with family and friends,’ but Watkins finds that young people’s internet use just ...”

“... Elena Kagan, Barack Obama’s nominee to replace the retiring Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee in late June. Before she is confirmed by the committee, she will have to answer questions about her views on the constitution and her lack of judicial experience ...”

“... counsel Vince Foster (who committed suicide in 1993) in order to cover up her transgressions. John Knox was surely right to label his 1558 diatribe against powerful women only The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, so well developed is the tradition of denigrating women thought to exercise influence from behind the ...”

“... he set to work on a thriller, using as his models Alistair MacLean and the Travis McGee series by John MacDonald, which focuses on a happy-go-lucky investigator with a romantic code of honour. Grant’s first stab at a name for his hero was Franklin, but one day, in an Asda in Kendal, his wife watched him grab something from a high shelf and remarked that, if ...”

“... them. They are rarely loved as much as Shakespeare’s sonnets or the verse of Jonson’s friend John Donne. His plays are a different matter. Among his contemporaries no dramatist other than Shakespeare has overtaken him. The depictions in his comedies of social and economic fantasy, and of their exploitation, have never seemed more pertinent than amid our ...”