“... have taken a very different line, and in their chapter on the general law of medical negligence John Finch and Robert Cowley (respectively an academic and a practising lawyer) commend them for doing so. The Canadian Supreme Court has pointed out that what is a reasonable risk to a doctor is not always so to the patient, and that to allow medical judgment ...”

“... In 1978, at a seminar on John Maynard Keynes held by the University of Kent, Raymond Williams talked about ‘The Significance of Bloomsbury as a Social and Cultural Group’. He accepted Leonard Woolf’s characterisation of Bloomsbury as consisting ‘of the upper levels of the professional middle class and county families, interpenetrated to a certain extent by the aristocracy’ with ‘an intricate tangle of ancient roots and tendrils stretching far and wide’ through those classes ...”

“... and warm hearts, not for pedantic historians. Gallacher was one of those who put it about that John Maclean was out of his mind, literally hallucinating, when he ran his Scottish Workers Republican Party in opposition to the infant CPGB. Nevertheless, the name of the great Marxist dominie was repeatedly invoked, and Pat Lally, Glasgow’s Labour ...”

“... weak introduction to his attack on the present Pope. Of course it is true, as O’Brien says, that John Paul II is an authoritarian and an obscurantist. (It could almost be said that these qualities come with the territory.) It is likewise the case that the Vatican and the Muslim extremists made common cause at the world population conference in Cairo. Yet ...”

“... with I.G. Farben and resisting participation in war production). United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis is more villainous than any businessman in No Ordinary Time, and although Doris Kearns Goodwin invokes Eleanor’s sympathy for the miners’ grievances, she treats the wartime mining strikes as Lewis’s personal vendetta against FDR. Brinkley ...”

“... overdue attention. Lawrence’s enemies still deny his comedy, which was often self-deprecating. John Carey, who wants all writers to be nice (ideally, as decent as Arnold Bennett), wrote a book about the nastiness of various modern writers called The Intellectuals and the Masses. In it Lawrence is scolded for his ‘fascism’, his ecstasies of ...”

“... and Kant. The ‘History will absolve me’ speech quotes, among other more famous names, John of Salisbury and John Knox. But as Szulc remarks, ‘one sees how his methodical mind subordinates all texts to his private interpretation.’ Castro had, and still has, a large appetite for information, but he appears to ...”

“... but still dramatic falls have been taking place in other states of the former Soviet Union). John Lloyd intends no irony in his title, but his book covers a time when Russians have abandoned birth in a big way. A new Russia may be in the process of being born, but new Russians are not. Far more serious than the refusal to reproduce is the collapse in ...”

“... some mail through the bedroom window, among it a Jiffy bag with a book in it from a Dublin friend, John, the nephew I recall of the Unionist doctor who found that bronze pin all those years ago. In the book, Trees of Ireland: Native and Naturalised, I read under Hazel: ‘Fruit, a true nut, egg-shaped, up to 2cm long, pale green becoming brown with woody ...”

“... getting away from Cambridge on frequent trips to Europe. He worked for a time in the studio of John La Farge and might have become a talented painter; he went with Louis Agassiz on a scientific expedition to the Amazon; he received a degree in medicine from Harvard, where, despite his abhorrence of laboratory work and mostly to please his father, he ...”

“... black velvet jacket, collar and tie. She was now in the orbit of Harland’s contributors and John Lane’s Keynotes – ‘George Etherton’, Evelyn Sharp, Netta Syrett and the languid but sharp-witted Ella D’Arcy. These young women were not Bohemians: they were dandies. They objected when Frederick Rolfe left lice on the furniture; Beardsley was ‘a ...”

“... a group of Parisian nominalists of whom the most radical was Jacques Almain, the most significant John Mair (1467-1550) – a Scot who taught Knox and Buchanan long before the Protestant Reformation. John Pocock is so dazzling in ‘Authority and Property: the Question of Liberal Origins’ that one has to rub one’s eyes ...”

“... his own ideas.’ The exact quotation, incidentally, comes from a letter Byron wrote to John Murray on 9 October 1820: Mr Keats whose poetry you enquire after – appears to me what I have already said; such writing is a sort of mental masturbation – he is always f – gg – g his Imagination. I don’t mean that he is indecent, but viciously ...”

“... ethical code controls that voice? What does it echo, in the long history of warfare examined by John Keegan and Richard Holmes in their book-of-the-television-series, Soldiers? It looks to me as if fighting men have adhered to perhaps half a dozen different codes. There is the ‘rape and pillage’ style: a gang of men sets off to plunder a wealthy ...”

“... loathing that reveals moments of horrifying, matter-of-fact cruelty. The book may well be – as John Bayley has called it, in the London Review of Books of 17 December 1981 – an ‘attempt at an intellectual imagination of the true nature of the 20th century’, though it is very far from being ‘the most remarkable’ of such attempts. To speak of it as ...”