“... that its commitment to equality represents a threat to liberty. He also convincingly criticised John Rawls – most recently in Rescuing Justice and Equality – for fundamental weaknesses in his conception of equality. But it is not at all clear that the question posed by Cohen’s last book, ‘Why not socialism?’, can be answered in the terms in which ...”

“... edited by Geoffrey Parker and Lesley Smith. Thanks particularly to the editors’ introduction and John Eddy’s essay on the effect of sunspots, the debate was pushed in a new direction: climate change and its impact on the food supply and demography now became a central theme. The absence of recorded sunspots and the presence of substantial carbon-14 ...”

“... at three in the morning.’ He doesn’t show much sympathy for the victims either: ‘They killed John Lennon, so why wouldn’t they kill this loser?’ he shrugs at one point. Mendieta may have a dark sense of humour – he deflects a reporter’s questions by announcing that ‘the victim lost his life because his head got smashed in by a meteor from ...”

“... reverberations from those events reached a long way: as far as the Cold War, the assassination of John F. Kennedy (maybe), Watergate and, every four years to this day, the American presidential election. It is a story that reminds us of the bond – political, cultural, economic, sentimental – between the United States and Cuba, a bond that tightened in the ...”

“... its oil resources. The three principal Democratic candidates – Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards – have already hedged their bets, refusing to promise that, if elected, they would remove American forces from Iraq before 2013, the end of their first term. Among the winners: oil-services companies like Halliburton; the oil companies themselves ...”

“... Millais was adept at many things. At theatre, for instance: in his 1878 Royal Academy showpiece, he cast the supposed murder victims of Richard III as two pretty, tremulous schoolboys poised on a dungeon’s downward-winding stair, their spotlit heads peering into the darkness confronting them, hands anxiously linking, blond chevelures merging into one ...”

“... murals to the Tate was an attempt to realise that ambition; to the same end, in 1964, he accepted John and Dominique de Menil’s commission to be the sole artist represented on the walls of a college chapel in Houston. The de Menils had already entrusted the design of the chapel to Johnson as part of his master plan for the University of St Thomas. The ...”

“... for the CIA’s Polish operations at the time, is unimpressed.) Walesa has the air of a Polish John Prescott, only bigger. He has not carried the last 25 years as well as the other Poles. What is even stranger, I find myself in an assembly of political ghosts. Leaving aside the Chinese, who avoid public discussions, a surprising number of those who made ...”

“... panoramas and theatrical reconstructions. Napoleon’s captured carriage was put on display at John Sainsbury’s Napoleon Museum in Piccadilly. Marengo, his horse, followed several years later, going on show in Pall Mall in 1823 before being put out to stud. On his deathbed, Napoleon even feared that his corpse would be exhibited in Westminster Abbey, but ...”

“... on the down escalator at nine o’clock in the morning. When the Number 30 passed a statue of John F. Kennedy in Marylebone Road, a teenager looked up at his mother. ‘It all started with him,’ he said. ‘I know what you mean,’ his mother said. ‘He was the first to get this amount of coverage.’ In Regent’s Park rows of old ladies were sitting ...”

“... on their way to becoming a distinct American people has a good pedigree, including J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, the source of all but one of Butler’s epigraphs. Crèvecoeur’s famous question was: ‘What then is this new man the American?’ His immediate answer – ‘that strange mixture of blood, which you ...”

“... of Cliveden, made available to Ward at weekends by Lord Astor, who with his friends, including John Profumo, the Minister for War, would chase a minutely towelled Keeler and others around the swimming pool. But all this, says Keeler, was a front for Ward’s real activity, which was spying for Russia on the British establishment during the months before ...”

“... a locksmith, one of whom once met Charles Manson (‘Was he crazy?’ the narrator asks. ‘Crazy? John says and gives me this look.// Crazy?//– Hell yes, he was crazy’); ‘Trolley’ describes a day in the life of a San Francisco trolley-car, like a Thomas the Tank Engine story for grown-ups; ‘Meat’ is a meditation on the daily delivery of carcasses ...”

“... the Mahrattas after Assaye, for example – did not actually perceive the English as attractively John Mortimerish compounds of energy, candour and decency, but as something altogether less benign. It is instructive to compare Englishness Identified with Ian Buruma’s recent book, Voltaire’s Coconuts, to which an American publisher has given the more bland ...”

“... her. The scene of the rescue, with both prince and princess practically naked, caused the prudish John Ruskin, a friend of MacDonald’s, to chide him for impropriety and moral danger, but MacDonald seems on this occasion to have taken an honi soit qui mal y pense attitude. Anyhow, the princess is so delighted by the experience that she and the prince spend ...”