“... Romney, Kerry – were seen as repeating whatever they thought the voters wanted to hear. (John McCain, Trump’s nemesis, was a special case, and may prove exemplary for Trump. A sincere guy, now a Republican saint, he appeared to be in poor health and possibly incapable of completing his term. The spectre of Sarah Palin as president made the choice ...”

“... may have been copied out in the ninth century by Leo the Geometer, a teacher and cousin of John VII, patriarch of Constantinople, who was fascinated by Archimedes. But then the thread breaks: Constantinople was sacked in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, leaving the city and its schools in disarray. The liturgical palimpsest was made in the wake of these ...”

“... set alongside the sophisticated works of immigrants. Great English patrons such as the cardinals John Morton and Thomas Wolsey, who travelled widely and had the contacts and the funds to commission whomever they liked, employed ‘expertest artificers that ware both farre and nere’ (as Wolsey’s gentleman usher George Cavendish put it). And, as Goldring ...”

“... but have not yet arrived at the perfection of putting it on the right way,’ he wrote to John Cam Hobhouse of his duties in March 1820, adding: ‘Nobody has been stabbed this winter.’ Things were different the following winter. After the Guicciolis’ separation, Byron grew close to Ruggiero and Pietro Gamba, who were key figures in the Romagna ...”

“... a redistricting map that sews up the outcome of a congressional election. In 2019, Chief Justice John Roberts declared that although the Supreme Court ‘does not condone excessive partisan gerrymandering’, any court-mandated intervention in district maps would inevitably look partisan and impugn the court’s neutrality. In 2017, during arguments in a ...”

“... the Hudson to West Point with friends for the day. Brooks had already been the mistress of General John Pershing and had helped break up the marriage of the British admiral Sir David Beattie. She was introduced to the glamorous young Superintendent. It was, in Perret’s view, a case of mutual and instantaneous lust. Others diagnosed the meshing of public ...”

“... suggesting that it would not have the slightest effect. He was fascinated, too, by the life of John Addington Symonds, about whom he heard regularly from Edmund Gosse, and when there was some suggestion that Symonds might be homosexual, he told Gosse that he was ‘devoured with curiosity as to this further revelation. Even a postcard (in covert ...”

“... or was it, as the writer Hilton Als put it, ‘a high-faggot style’, or did it originate, as John Edgar Wideman claimed, from a mixture of the King James Bible and African American speech? Was it full of the clarity, eloquence and intelligence that Chinua Achebe suggested? And was Baldwin’s involvement with the Civil Rights Movement a cautionary tale ...”

“... Rayburn was adamantly opposed to the idea after what he’d seen happen to another Texan titan, John Nance Garner, who had traded his power as speaker of the House to become FDR’s running mate in 1932. Eight years later Garner went back to Texas a bitter man, to eke out his days as a pecan farmer; the vice-presidency had broken him. (It was Garner who ...”

“... in the 1990s was self-imposed. But as Georgina Born makes clear in her definitive analysis of the John Birt and Greg Dyke eras, the consistent impetus came from government. It’s no surprise that Margaret Thatcher wanted to take on the BBC – if anything, the surprise is how long it took her. (In her first term, Thatcher’s main concern was with BBC ...”

“... beyond the federal boundary, or even marking trees to signal future claims. Twenty years later, John Quincy Adams did not hesitate to send troops to burn down squatters’ homes and crops in Alabama. But these legal enforcements would be swept away in the coming demographic storm. The settler-sceptical northeastern Federalists had many political ...”

“... or ‘neo-authoritarian’, what is indisputable is that it has unleashed what John Ganz has called a sense of ‘moral anarchy’, in which there are no longer any limits to the expression of sadism, or to its implementation as policy. Children are forcibly separated from their parents. Migrants from Venezuela are flown to a concentration ...”

“... to the ideas that were turning that world upside down. This is the Irvine of the novelist John Galt, who was born at a house in the High Street in 1779. He was the son of a sea-captain, and he didn’t keep well, but as a child he scurried around this changing locality, chasing the world that was going, and greeting the new one coming in. His ...”

“... Winston Churchill on political history, Edward Elgar on music, Gabriel Pascal on film direction, John Reith on the BBC, and especially actors on acting (he was fond of them much in the way one is fond of children: they needed discipline as well as praise). His tone is often what might have been found offensive had people not come to expect it as part of the ...”

“... science fiction, poetry, crime. The tools of the trade: as well as philosophy (by his brother John among others), French literature and plenty of proper angst-and-pepper stuff in several languages. The bungalow, screened off from a quiet street (flags, palm-trees, car-ports, a patch of grass on which a large rabbit sometimes appears), is unpretentious and ...”