“... of the same sculpture (it was ‘the noblest presentment of the human countenance’, according to John Buchan), Beard allows herself a smile in reserve. Under re-examination by 20th-century curators, the bust lost its honoured plinth in the museum. Once hailed as a study done from life, it is now stored away as an 18th-century pastiche. Beard relates many ...”

“... cruel and unenlightened Catholic zealots. Thomas Eakins visited Spain in 1869, followed later by John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt and others, bringing back visual and written descriptions of a country they thought both colourful and charming. The ‘Spanish craze’ reached epidemic proportions in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of ...”

“... highs and lows of his contemporaries among the Beat Generation, a phrase invented by Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes in 1949 but not widely used until three years later, when Holmes’s article ‘The Beat Generation’ appeared in the New York Times. Most of the Beats, Kerouac included, were out for nihilistic self-destructive fun of a kind which, as ...”

“... the Mill. Rutherford had sat here on the wall and watched the atoms pursue their unbroken curve. John Maynard Keynes had looked into that clear declension and seen the economic consequences of the Versailles Treaty. Wittgenstein had seen the silence of what cannot be expressed, Alan Turing the soul of a machine. Apparently there was now some crippled young ...”

“... Park in Hampshire – as well as jokier numbers – Terry Farrell’s boathouse at Henley and John Outram’s Isle of Dogs pumping-house. It stretches to high technology in Michael Hopkins’s stand at Lord’s cricket ground and to eclectic neo-vernacular in Jeremy Dixon’s crow-stepped-gabled housing in Docklands. Among the targets for the Prince’s ...”

“... has to be accepted. For other critics, James’s book is a study in delusion. The Gothic novelist John Hawkes has hailed The Grotesque, noting its resemblance to the James, and both works belong to the category of the tale of mystery and imagination which keeps us in uncertainty as to whether or not the narrator can be believed. Since critics are given to ...”

“... remained – but the style of commitment was transformed. On New Year’s Day 1839, the Rev. John Rayner Stephens spoke to a Chartist rally on Newcastle’s Town Moor. There were about forty thousand angry people at the meeting. Stephens declared himself ‘a revolutionist by fire, a revolutionist by blood, to the knife, to the death’. If the hated new ...”

“... that it is the former who have written the novels which present the past to the common reader.’) John Mercury is an exciting tale about those men who, risking transportation and prison, smuggled on carts and mail coaches, then up and down the railways, batches of pamphlets, broadsheets, newsheets, all clandestinely printed or copied out by hand – the ...”

“... photography to her portfolio. She has never been short of professional admirers. Jean Cocteau and John Grierson are fulsome in their praise. Mick Jagger tells her he has seen some of her films 15 times. Nor, of course, does she lack detractors; the fiercest in recent years has been Susan Sontag, who traced a line of Fascist exaltation right through the ...”

“... carried on, with his awful quasi-American evangelical rallies, as though people couldn’t think. John Hewson, whose like I trust we shall never see again in this arena, was brought up a Baptist – he’s still got that pious look – and studied postgraduate economics in the USA. Later he left the wife who’d typed his thesis and raised the kids, telling ...”

“... anthropocentric than it is theocentric, no more subjectivist than it is metaphysical. Even my hero John Dewey, the instrumentalist’s instrumentalist, hoped for such a horizon. Dewey warned us against ‘the essentially irreligious attitude ... which attributes human achievement and purpose to man in isolation from the world of physical nature and his ...”

“... Peckham to Bermondsey in order to give it a more authentically working-class flavour (shades of John Major?). A generation earlier, H.G. Wells grew up in a basement kitchen with a mother as discontented as Steedman’s and Woodward’s, a mother who abandoned the domestic hearth, and forced her younger son out into the world as a draper’s apprentice the ...”

“... tide has suddenly turned. The tirade against Brussels from Mrs Thatcher’s former adviser, Sir John Hoskyns, was not well received by the Institute of Directors he was still serving. Opinion polls show and the results of the Euro-elections confirm that outright hostility to the Community is no longer an obvious winner. Mrs Thatcher is suffering both from ...”

“... had shaken off the dust of Oak Park, Illinois, he was at least in a position to say hullo to John Updike in the office corridor. He had put enough mileage between himself and his origins to achieve urbanity. Yet it takes only a brief comparison between Keillor’s Lake Wobegon stories and Updike’s Rabbit novels (or, even more to the point, Updike’s ...”

“... Hogg and Melville, as with Wordsworth, Keats, Mary Shelley, William Godwin or, for that matter, John Calvin, was not a puritan ‘state of mind’, but the sense of living and writing at the periphery of a dominant culture that had, nonetheless, become central to his or her life’s work. That sense of marginality arose in response to historical ...”