“... you sipped it. The drip-and-strainer method produced a fiendishly strong brew, an opaque deep red brown, which was then sweetened with two teaspoonsful of sugar. You weren’t supposed to taste the milk, it simply stopped the tea being transparent. My grandfather, whom I remember meeting only once, in a room somewhere in the East End that smelled of old age ...”

“... of democracy and with it the BBC and Patten. In 1997, Murdoch was more interested in wrecking John Major’s media legislation than anything else, and had procured from Tony Blair a promise that once in power he would dilute any such legislation. McKnight also argues – convincingly – that were Murdoch interested only in the opinion polls he would have ...”

“... part-Spanish friend is often ‘black’ if there is a hint of Africa in his or her make-up. John Bellew, the husband of Clare Kendry in Nella Larsen’s exquisite novel Passing (1929), responds violently when he finds out that Clare, who has cheeks of ‘ivory’ and hair the colour of ‘pale gold’, is ‘black’. All those years, ...”

“... with help from his father, his own farm on Staten Island. He visited his younger brother, John, at Yale, making friends with some of his high-minded circle, including Charles Loring Brace, who later founded the Children’s Aid Society. Brace and the Olmsted brothers travelled to Europe in 1850, walking through the English countryside and visiting ...”

“... at the end of the 14th century, set his son up as a lawyer. The lawyer bought land, and his son John inherited more, including Caister Castle, from his wife’s cousin, Sir John Fastolf. The Pastons always married well. They fought to maintain the Fastolf inheritance – in the courts against competing claimants but also ...”

“... about. Yesterday’s bourgeois media correspondent becomes today’s revolutionary press officer. John Reed was not the first or the last journalist to follow this trajectory. But he remains the most spectacular. He went to report Russia after the February Revolution in 1917, made straight for the Petrograd Bolsheviks and became a denizen of the seething ...”

“... with ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ (Phillips Brooks) and ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’ (John Greenleaf Whittier) as runners-up. Among the works of the canonical English poets, the lines known to most people are probably those beginning Blake’s Milton, ‘And did those feet in ancient time ...’, which Parry set to music and turned into the hymn ...”

“... resurrected for some time to come. Coincident with the end of socialism in any meaningful sense, John Gray tells us that ‘a liberal political philosophy is an impossibility,’ and Ted Honderich announces that Conservatism is a nullity. If both of them are right and can be taken at face value, there does not seem to be much left. Dr Gray’s original ...”

“... forty years, as a fiction editor on the New Yorker, he advised and goaded Nabokov, Eudora Welty, John Cheever and John Updike. Now, at nearly ninety, Maxwell’s face has a prairie gauntness, as if hollowed out by exposure to those bracing talents. But in Britain his name is almost unknown. He was born in 1908 in ...”

“... so close to the leather-jacketed, blue-jeaned rock idol (the ‘love child of Bob Dylan and James Brown’, as Jon Stewart joked) that we could almost have fist-bumped. To get this close, we journos had to bring specific photo ID (‘driver’s licence or passport’), be searched, undertake to make notes only with pen and notepad, refrain from ...”

“... travellers eager not only to witness but to participate in the old ways of the high jungle and brown river. Joyless but determined as penitents, credit-card visitors grasp the proffered tribal hands, sway and stamp to the beat of a small drum, as they try to evaluate the authenticity of the chanting voices and the provocations of a monkey-man trickster in ...”

“... that the end was near. It came in February 1971, in the Minneapolis office of Harper’s owner John Cowles Jr and William Blair, the magazine’s president and its chief executive officer. Mailer had just written The Prisoner of Sex to be the whole cover for the March issue, and one of the other Minnesota businessmen at the nearly four-hour meeting ...”

“... indulge in orgies of this: ‘We consigned to the flames or the waves one Gunter Grass, two John Fowles, a Nabokov, a John Berger, three Doris Lessings, a Gore Vidal, two John Barths, and the whole of Jorge Luis Borges.’ This impatience with literary artefacts means that he and ...”

“... close of World War II. He attended Harvard, where he began a close friendship with his classmate, John Ashbery. After a year (1950-51) in Michigan writing and translating poetry, he moved to New York, where he rejoined his Harvard friends and their friends – among them the poets Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and Barbara Guest – becoming part of a social ...”

“... fur and the fabric and the raised and knotted embroideries on the fabric, all of which melt into a brown mess on close examination, and only achieve form when one steps back. Oddly favourite is a portrait of the (unappealing) Pope Paul III in a faded rose-coloured cape enthroned on a worn velvet chair, the supreme pontiff just a lay figure there to demonstrate ...”