“... to the public at large. Impatience with the old ways had spread far beyond the media. Sir John Hunt, a former cabinet secretary, broke cover as early as election day 1983 to voice the discontents of the mandarins:In the absence in our system of a chief executive with his own supporting staff, a ‘hole in the centre’ of government was perceived ...”

“... he devoted a great deal of his later imaginative effort precisely to not sounding like he used to. John Bayley, an attentive but sceptical admirer, once shrewdly said of the early Hill manner: ‘The danger with this sort of poetry is that it is the kind that looks like poetry, which need not mean that it is not the real thing, but is bound to raise a certain ...”

“... surprise and intensely interesting. Among the good ones are ‘The Old House at Home’, about Old John McSorley and his son Old Bill, who founded and carried on McSorley’s Old Ale House in New York’s East Village; the already described ‘Mazie’ and ‘Lady Olga’; and ‘The Mohawks in High Steel’, which, along with much else, is one of the best ...”

“... came across: much of Hunky Dory consists of pastiches of Bowie’s musical heroes of the 1960s – John Lennon, Syd Barrett, Anthony Newley, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground. Which would make Ziggy Stardust the beautiful butterfly that emerged from the chrysalis. Paul Trynka begins his biography with a description of Bowie’s performance of ‘Starman’ on ...”

“... girly-boy who hymned his cheap-suit backstreet bohemia over blackout power chords – as Smith’s John the Baptist. Horses betrays a love of early Kinks, Them, Who, but reframes their riffy aesthetic with studied artfulness. How much credit should go to the producer, John Cale, isn’t clear. Smith never sounded this ...”

“... a commodity squandered as I had never known it before. 22 May. Reading Frank Kermode’s review of John Haffenden’s life of Empson makes me regret a little that Empson was cut out of The History Boys. In the first version of the play Hector sings the praises of Sheffield where he had been taught by Empson, then recounts to the boys wanting to go to Cambridge ...”

“... until recently the jostling crowd of titles included no Marxist study, the exception to this rule, John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff’s Great Financial Crisis, having been bolted together out of editorials from one of those socialist journals, the American Monthly Review.2 Not until now, with David Harvey’s Enigma of Capital, have we had a book-length ...”

“... forth to London and Edinburgh, intrigued by what looked to be but was not a reliable offer from John Stuart Mill of a position at the new London Review, Carlyle and Jane moved into the house in Cheyne Row where they would live for the rest of their lives. They began to find their way into literary society almost at once. Emerson had already sought out ...”

“... Grit and Glamour of an Icon’. She has interviewed more than 250 people, starting with the late John Warner (Taylor’s penultimate husband, a Republican senator) and her book reads like an extended feature for Vanity Fair. We learn that Bob Dylan adored her in Raintree County and that David Lynch kissed her after the 1987 Oscars (she was a fan of Blue ...”

“... on to accuse the English of betraying their precious inheritance. The rot began, he said, with John Stuart Mill, who started off as a liberal but went on to swallow a toxic draught of German metaphysics and then succumbed to the feminist wiles of Harriet Taylor, who married him and led him astray. Under Taylor’s tutelage, it seems, Mill ‘slid slowly ...”

“... the ostentatious solemnity one finds in the liturgical minimalism of composers like Arvo Pärt and John Tavener. The Messiaen ‘cathedral’, if not exactly ecumenical, is vast, with plenty of room in the nave – as Edward Said noted – for ‘staunch secularists like myself’. The sixth movement of Vingt Regards, a turbulent fugue, is called ‘Par Lui ...”

“... caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring himself to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking ...”

“... by this point driven almost mad by its antagonism towards Europe and its commensurate contempt for John Major – refused to endorse a party and instead chose to support whichever candidate was the most Eurosceptic in each constituency. The result was that the Times encouraged its readers to vote for Jeremy Corbyn in Islington. For much of its history it had ...”

“... John Reed,​ witness to the October Revolution and author of Ten Days that Shook the World, seems to have turned against the Bolshevik leaders just before he died in Moscow in 1920. His apostasy was not publicly known, however, and a decade later the American Communist Party, eager to exploit his fame, encouraged the formation of John Reed Clubs in New York and other cities ‘to bring closer all creative workers ...”

“... of railways into spaces where they had previously been completely absent, preservationists like John Ruskin and William Wordsworth (‘Is then no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault?’). The agents of Network Rail, who are building the Ordsall Chord, can and do portray themselves playing the Stephenson role. They claim originality: the ...”