“... seemed to me,’ Henry James wrote to the critic and campaigner for homosexual rights John Addington Symonds in 1884, ‘that the victims of a common passion should sometimes exchange a look.’ The common passion James referred to was for Italy – or was it?Here is one double-take. In Mansfield Park, published in 1814, Mary Crawford is rattling ...”

“... Shelley, who clearly understood that he was to see it through the press, but the nervous publisher John Murray preferred the politically safe editorial hand of William Gifford. The material censored by Murray and Gifford now appears in full, and McGann is right to point to the enhancement of Childe Harold as one of the great contributions of his edition so ...”

“... proprietary rights over territories ‘lost’ by incompetent Presidents or neglectful officials. John Stempel’s book Inside the Iranian Revolution exemplifies this attitude. As Deputy Chief of the Political Section of the US Embassy, Stempel served in Tehran during the critical years from 1975 to mid-1979, after the fall of the Shah, when most of the ...”

“... Lover’, ‘Hill of the Bees’, ‘A Myth Enacted’, ‘Slow Bell from the High Hill’, ‘John Hunter’s Canal’, ‘The Lawn of Trees and Rocks’, ‘Quelle Histoire’, and (an unusual exertion of sympathy) ‘Dulled Son of Man’. In a poem to Ivor Gurney, Grigson, who can sometimes be magnanimous to the dead, hails Gurney as a poet of ...”

“... protective suavity, the counterfeit of impeccable logic or a minute calibration of fashion. John Berryman once said to a friend: ‘Doesn ‘t reading Stendhal make you feel intelligent!’ The same is true of Hazlitt; and the justified praise of Paulin’s book is that the compliment to our amour-propre survives his exploration to a generous ...”

“... Not Browning: but its author had read ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came’. Both are by John Leicester Warren, Lord de Tabley. Not that he doesn’t write well, but the well-made poem is not what Eliot and Pound made of Tennyson and Browning. What is most individual in the anthology is that which lies outside the orbit of the great names: James ...”

“... tell you how awful it was. This period has now gone down in history as the great renaissance, with John Osborne, the Royal Court, but most of the time, night after night, you would go and see wretched actors, and there would always be something in the play like ‘God, is this never going to end?’ and Gallery Nell would seize her chance. One of the most ...”

“... his own implementation of them than from their exaggeration by his clerical lieutenants, not least John Cosin at Peterhouse, a college where Laudianism ‘had run riot’ (and on which Trevor-Roper bestows the benefit of his analogical instinct, for it ‘was then, as now, a very small college’, where ‘conversation at the high table may not have been very ...”

“... of military occupation. In Fire on the Mountain Terry Bissell posits a world in which a successful John Brown’s raid sets off a black revolution in the American South which leads to the formation of a socialist state, ultra-modern and prosperous, in contrast with the shabby private-enterprise North that limps along on the crumbs of world trade. But what if ...”

“... It was anyway too late, he said. Everyone was dead. In Oxfam’s headquarters the press officer, John Magrath, wanted to go public; he told Herson that to give it a name would at least provide a moral and legal stick with which to beat the Security Council. Later a call came in from Alfred Sakafu, an Oxfam emergencies officer in Tanzania, to say that ...”

“... and security, that we can recognise how weird those years really were. The importance of John Lewis Gaddis’s book is that it is the first coherent and sustained attempt to write the Cold War’s history since it ended. That alone makes it hard to resist, but it is also wise and imaginative and written in a vigorous, simple English which is a ...”

“... political activity and lobbying, but was a bad speaker, a reserved, cautious, taciturn man who, John Aubrey noted, ‘had not a generall acquaintance’. He lived in meagre lodgings in central London, and appears to have had a close friendship with Prince Rupert which, according to an early Marvell editor, Thomas Cooke, meant that when it was unsafe for him ...”

“... 155 east-west streets drawn on open land in 1807. The grid was a piece of real estate speculation (John Jacob Astor made his fortune not by trading furs, as American folklore has it, but by buying up blocks as the city pushed north); nevertheless, Koolhaas calls it, with Corbusierian hyperbole, ‘the most courageous act of prediction in Western ...”

“... as heroic, but it is also questioned. ‘Curiously enough,’ Schuyler tells Lincoln’s secretary John Hay on the novel’s last page, Bismarck ‘has now done the same thing to Germany that you tell us Mr Lincoln did to our country’. Of all the novels in the sequence, Lincoln pays most attention, though not very elaborate attention, to characters from the ...”

“... Two weeks later, Colnbrook detainees sent out by email ‘An Open Petition to the World’. John Reid, they reported, had made a secret inspection of the detention centre yet ‘no asylum seeker ever saw or spoke to the home secretary, he was surrounded by such a crowd of security and bodyguards.’ They also claimed that at Haslar and Harmondsworth ...”