“... the pendulum has swung more sharply in the opposite direction than at any time since the days of John Foster Dulles. The Clark Amendment has been repealed and Congress finds itself fighting a losing rearguard action against the White House practice of bypassing its prohibition against direct CIA involvement in Nicaragua by resorting to the familiar use of ...”

“... tortured and sent to an unspeakably protracted death, Fanny is saved thanks to the good offices of John Chapman – also known as Johnny Appleseed, pioneer, missionary, follower of Emanuel Swedenborg and one of America’s more colourful minor folk-heroes. The novel concludes with a poem commemorating Chapman, and a short postscript written by Keene to his son ...”

“... But if the obsequies are awkward, ‘a good death’ in the 17th-century sense, like John Evelyn’s touching description at his mother’s bedside in 1635 – now that is really difficult. One name is common to Rosemary Dinnage’s thanatological anthology of personal views about hopes and fears, and the social-historical essays edited by Ralph ...”

“... the correct, impartial course between unpalatable extremes. Amnesty International’s US director, John Healey, even suggested that those critics doubting the incubator story were in effect denying all Iraqi human rights abuses as disclosed by Amnesty. In fact, there was only one critic – me – and I emphasised that most of Amnesty’s other charges had ...”

“... of ‘the texture of testimony’, the ‘intimation of character’. He also, however, quotes John Bayley’s view, similar to the one expressed here, that these ‘losses’ are really gains, that the serial makes concise and clear much in the novels that is otiose and woolly. The book is a very useful addition to the biography in showing the ...”

“... probably set out to write a book about the three dock-strike leaders, Tom Mann, Ben Tillett and John Burns. At some stage, he presumably plumped lor Mann because he is so much more consistent than the other two. Burns ended up in the Liberal Government and Tillett became a TUC mandarin and a shameless spokesman for the collaborationist Mond-Turner proposals ...”

“... me – teacher and fisherman, doctor and professor, needlewoman and clerk. I recall as usual John Betjeman’s astonishment at this point when he saw that Britain had not tapered to a finish between the mountains and the sea, that a city spread before him full of bookshops and colleges and modern businesses. The poor man might have had a brainstorm if he ...”

“... as £168,000 from English copyrights. Another work that made a great deal of money in England was John Stainer’s The Crucifixion, first performed in 1887, and unmentioned by Pahlen. Called into question time and time again both for its ‘inane’ libretto and its patchy music, it was nonetheless described by one contemporary reviewer as ...”

“... of with the increasingly tatty heritage park of Fortress Britain. A new book by Richard Mayne and John Pinder shows that the history of the federal idea remains instructive.* For when the Schuman Plan turned Monnet’s ideas about European federation into a proposal for a coal and steel community, Britain kept out of it. When the European Defence Community ...”

“... letters to civil servants, scholars and friends (among them Henry Cole, Edward Fitzgerald and John Forster) demanding access to documents or help with maps for his work on Cromwell. He expected help as his right, and he got it. But he never merged into metropolitan literary and social circles. As Anne Procter noted, in a letter helpfully quoted by the ...”

“... schools public schools and Mehta tells us why – which seems a bit much in a book published by John Murray. Christopher Hill – he of the little-finger handshake – is asked to explain the attractions of Marxism in the light of the Hungarian Revolution. Lord Oxmanton’s mother is asked to explain the rules and rituals of pheasant-shoots. Useful stuff if ...”

“... brains of modern theorists. All of which makes one turn with some relief to mere history. Sir John Neale’s immensely readable biography of Elizabeth, first published in 1934, heralded a new era in the study of her reign. Neale gave a deeply sympathetic picture of the Queen; even time was kind to her, a notion which she herself had tried to instill in ...”

“... British (1987) about Auden, Dali, MacNeice and Co – both begins and ends with the first words of John Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’ (‘Quinquereme of Nineveh’), like a serpent with its tail in its mouth. Codes and allusions proliferate in ‘Yarrow’ too, but are not allowed to structure its meanings or progression to the same extent; underlying – or ...”

“... liberties as an expression of royal weakness. The outpouring of royal charters under Richard I and John has traditionally been regarded as the equivalent of selling the ancestral silver for petty cash. Paradoxically, this reading derives from another aspect of belief in the feudal system. If a ruler’s power consists of rights deriving from the overlordship ...”

“... to yourself,’ in an address to the Rambler about plainsong. Such support made the fastidious John Henry Newman shudder. ‘A profound silence’, he suggested, was the only way ‘to bear such blushing honours’. Nothing in Pugin’s life was more dramatic than his own transformation from talented but undirected dilettante to Roman Catholic ...”