“... 19th century – a good boy doesn’t throw his footman out of the window. The book is in the John Johnson Collection of Ephemera at the Bodleian, and this scene was pictured, as I recall, taking place in a panelled room – a prefects’ study, perhaps, or a dining club. Boys’ play, then. And although circumstances and contexts change, still ...”

“... nuclear winter, passed down in a counter canon about a chatty devil, ‘Mr Clevver’ or ‘Drop John’, who teaches rudimentary survival skills to a couple in exchange for their child’s heart. Pieces of the past remain, but only in mangled form (the leaders of the tribal government are referred to as the Prime Mincer and the Wes Mincer). The survivors ...”

“... effort required by the only writer I can think of who achieves comparable effects, the novelist M. John Harrison. The repeated motif of a phrase returning in two other languages also acts to shift the reader’s perception of the linguistic basis of reality by referencing shared experience at the same time as it reminds us of the different ways it can be ...”

“... by the result of that game, of course. I had wanted England to win and my heart, too, leaped when John Barnes came on to make those electrifying runs up the left wing, and Gary Lineker scored. But I wasn’t prepared for the animosity and invective directed against Maradona in the playground the next day. I didn’t say anything, but I marvelled at how ...”

“... he incorporates lyrics from Dizzee Rascal, K-Trap and Frank Ocean, as well as quotations from John Boughton’s Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing (2018), an essay published by the American Academy of Ophthalmology and a Netflix show about the interior designer Ilse Crawford. His own photographs are interspersed throughout the book. A ...”

“... Herbert, fourth earl of Pembroke, with his family. His faithful transcription of Van Dyck’s Lord John Stuart and His Brother, Lord Bernard Stuart, thought to have been completed on site at Cobham Hall in the 1760s, is one of his finest achievements. Even Reynolds praised the copy as indistinguishable from the original. The vogue for Van Dyck was not without ...”

“... liberation. Despite this, Garvey was taken up by the religion as a divinely inspired prophet, the John the Baptist of Rastafari. By 1940, he too was in England. Haile Selassie declined an invitation to meet him. Garvey died that year, a fact that many of his unwanted followers refused to believe, and since Haile Selassie’s reported demise in 1975 his own ...”

“... arranged for Jill Biden to pay a visit to a Coke job-training programme in Brazil, joined Joe and John Kerry for the unveiling of the Coke-sponsored 2014 World Cup trophy, and tagged along with Jill as part of a government delegation to Cuba, which happens to be one of only two countries in the world where Coke can’t be bought or sold (the other is North ...”

“... Ever since the 18th century it has been universally accepted that one of the main foundations of a civilised society is the rule of law. The Enlightenment taught that Nature itself worked by clear and invariable laws, and saw no reason why human society should not do the same. Much that was wrong with existing institutions could be explained in these terms, and when the French Revolutionaries set out to build a new order from its foundations, they proclaimed the rule of law as the most basic of all their guiding principles ...”

“... from a kind of generalised Darwinism. More original is the assertion that Woolf ‘remembers’ John Tyndall’s work on light and heat when describing the colour of the sky as ‘the blue that has escaped registration’ (Between the Acts) – Tyndall having established in the 1870s that the blue of the sky was distance, not colour. The very structure of ...”

“... revolutionists with a schema. The pervasive influence of Country publicists like Thomas Gordon, John Trenchard, Bolingbroke and Benjamin Hoadly on colonial pamphleteers is now taken for granted. American historians have tested Bailyn’s thesis by extending and particularising it. This is what T.H. Breen has done in Tobacco Culture. The impact of Country ...”

“... it doesn’t write up, the journalist’s participation seems, to the reader, pathetically vain. (John Mortimer has occasionally brought off the celebrity duologue, but he is the exception.) But many journalists (including, I suspect, Ms Malcolm) are reluctant to endure the denial of ego that interviewing entails. ‘What about me? Don’t you want to hear my ...”

“... allies of Bonnie Prince Charlie, a General Forster, whose surname I bear between the ‘John’ and the ‘Woodward’. That relationship comes via my father’s mother, and is, I have to admit, fairly tenuous. These words might in themselves be merely ironic: the self-made man proud of his personal achievement who stresses the obscurity of his ...”

“... one of his flâneurial rambles from Greenwich Village to the United Nations, reflections on a John Ashbery poem. Plainly he has read a lot of books. This one abounds with arresting quotations and alludes learnedly and appositely to philosophers, theologians, historians, political theorists, artists, architects, novelists and poets. Yet it is no mere ...”

“... and the friends she acquired for herself and met through her first marriage, to publisher John Rodker, she could within reason command whatever pulpit, platform or stage she needed. Once free of the security and conventions of her home and the violent claims that the countryside all around it made on her emotions, and having then sloughed off her ...”