“... a top examinee and an important official at the age of 30 in the East India Office, sitting beside John Stuart Mill and Bentham. There he is, convulsing the office with his stories and talk, and yet he inaugurates the first steamboat service to India. The amateur becomes the professional. The steamboats were an important service to the Empire, though one, he ...”

“... certainty about who really did what to whom than if Jeremy Thorpe, George Deakin, David Holmes and John Le Mesurier had been invited to take off their shoes and socks and walk along a trench full of glowing charcoal. As with the trench method, the populace gathered to watch or to read about how the defendants survived this ancient, agonising, irrational test ...”

“... had just inherited in shady circumstances, after furious litigation, a fortune from her friend Sir John Scott: but there was perpetual bickering and backbiting about the allowance. One of Harold’s reasons for seeking in 1929 the more lucrative path of journalism was to escape dependence upon his half-mad mother-in-law. Harold Nicolson was born in 1886 in ...”

“... Frances Yates, Rykwert discusses the interest in architecture shown by the Elizabethan magus John Dec and the possible connection between Dee and Inigo Jones. So far, so good: Perrault had not written yet. But it turns out – another exciting discovery – that Sir Christopher Wren, despite his admiration for Perrault’s writings, was also interested ...”

“... it was Chamberlain, breaking with old orthodoxies, who sought to achieve through tariff reform Sir John Seeley’s vision of a Greater Britain equipped for the struggles of the 20th century. Many efforts have been made to interpret Chamberlain and the great U-turn he performed in mid-career. Inevitably, the supporters of Mr Gladstone regarded him as a traitor ...”

“... North’ and the man who hid from his creditors under Blackwood’s table. ‘North’ (John Wilson) had invited De Quincey to Edinburgh, in the hope that he would provide him with lectures for his Edinburgh Professorship of Moral Philosophy – a subject of which Wilson knew little and practised less. De Quincey lived in or near Edinburgh for over ...”

“... In 1507 Damian, Abbot of Tungland – variously known as ‘the Italian’ or ‘Master John, the French leech’ – undertook to fly from Scotland to France. ‘To that effect he had a pair of wings made from feathers. When they were fastened to him, he flew from the castle walls of Stirling, but at once fell to the ground and broke his ...”

“... campaigner and local Labour Party member, read some of her poems, including a rumbustious reply to John Betjeman which she called ‘In Praise of Slough’ – ‘those bombs aren’t such a huge joke any more.’ The main session over, we were offered Judith Chernaik on Shelley’s feminism or Elma Dangerfield on Byron and Shelley or Marilyn Butler on the ...”

“... and what isn’t, the Council’s main concern is of course with cash. Out of office, Norman St John-Stevas would say that government provision for the arts was wholly inadequate: in office, he reduced that provision. Lord Gowrie, better attuned to his party’s mood, was so far from thinking the grant inadequate that he cut it again and encouraged the ...”

“... Saurat to the first fifty.) The Pryce-Jones introduction has now been replaced by an Afterword by John Fowles, less sensitive, but more enthusiastic. Fowles, who follows Robert Gibson* in taking Seurel as the central character, tells us that he was once under the influence of Alain-Fournier, and is still ‘a besotted fan’. He deserts the ...”

“... steps of the journey back to consciousness. The bridge itself forms part of a dream, and as John Orr revives, the fantastical structure becomes a reason for carrying on dreaming, since it alone offers hope of bridging gaps in the activity of his mind which have resulted from the accident. Orr’s reaction to all this, to the dream itself, is futilely to ...”

“... musings on the first half of a cryptic Biblical verse (Isaiah 65: 20) reappear in Aelfric, John Mirk, perhaps Pearl; Gregory’s interpretation of the second half of the verse influences not only Bede and Aelfric but Petrarch and various Middle English works, including such an unlikely one as Dunbar’s ‘Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the ...”

“... best-selling writers, their business is not in the main literary, and in 1972 the prizewinner, John Berger, made a speech in which he expressly deplored what he regarded as the exploitative nature of the donor’s principal interest; indeed he gave half his prize to a revolutionary movement. Other writers have shown some embarrassment but have not, so far ...”

“... embarrassing given our distance from the object of its sympathy. The narrator of the novel, John Berry, is a familiarly likeable, because hapless, comic innocent (he too, though, is corruptible), whose baffled encounters with Pirates’s guests allow the author to parade their awfulness. These encounters produce the best moments in the novel, especially ...”

“... and the Vienna Circle, Brian McGuinness quotes from a letter that Wittgenstein wrote to John Maynard Keynes in 1924: ‘You ask in your letter whether you could do anything to make it possible for me to return to scientific work. The answer is, No: there’s nothing that can be done in that line, because I myself no longer have any strong inner ...”