“... her house with a trio of uninvited guests: Mr Vercueil, a white down-and-out, and Bheki and John, two teenagers on the run from the Police. Bheki is the son of Florence, Elizabeth’s black housemaid (Florence also has two baby daughters significantly named Hope and Beauty). But Florence has come to realise that, in a country where children have learnt ...”

“... parents had a nerve, to call him Cassius’. To appreciate this we need to recall the assassin John Wilkes Booth and his father, also an actor, whose forenames were Junius Brutus. This is characteristic of Carter’s allusiveness, and of her masterly interweaving of history and fiction. One would have to be the most devoted of theatre buffs to get out of ...”

“... since the abandonment of an East of Suez role in the Sixties. The last such attempt was made by John Nott just before the Falklands War. 5. Out-of-area capabilities. The White Paper emphasises the need to retain a ‘national capability to deal with contingencies outside the Nato area’, such as the Gulf War. It describes the deployment of troops in the ...”

“... and it reads well, though some may reasonably continue to prefer the recent translation by John McDowell in the Clarendon Plato ...”

“... Private Gardens of London. Written by a landscape gardener, and beautifully photographed by John Miller, the book’s focus is a series of nearly forty gardens from different parts of the metropolis. The Museum of London’s scheme to collect pictures and photographs of London gardens will surely result in a more representative sample, but this is a ...”

“... Hawk’, but not because he wished to suggest any hint of beakiness. His predecessor had been John Squire, whose pseudonym was ‘Solomon Eagle’. It is easy enough to see why, for such as Leavis, MacCarthy might be perceived as the apotheosis of indolent metropolitan bookman-ship. Scrutiny, after all, was in some measure aimed as a ‘serious’ riposte ...”

“... Am I eccentric?’ Edward James once asked me in the days before I was added to his long list of enemies both real and imaginary. ‘I suppose I am, but I don’t mean to be. I’ve always tried to behave like everyone else.’ We were sitting on the platform of one of the inevitably incomplete concrete follies he was building at enormous expense on a hillside he owned by proxy in a Mexican jungle ...”

“... chip.’ Wilson had little to say about the pencil: what it achieved was too ephemeral. Nor did John Middleton Murry in his book called Pencillings, where despite his title, he left the pencil alone: instead, he included one chapter on ‘The Golden Pen’. It was left to Nabokov to produce an alternative view of the writer’s contribution to history from ...”

“... in a besetting sin shared with Alec, and with certain other famous Scots before them: the John Knox syndrome. There is always a most unnecessary sermon, forced into the mouth of one of the characters, and belonging there about as well as salt cod in a goldfish bowl. (In this novel, it is Elspeth’s impassioned little homily on Scottish ...”

“... with its relationship with France and Britain, and Mr Arafat’s lunches and dinners with John Major and François Mitterrand. One also wonders how, with so excellent ‘a friend in the White House’, Mr Arafat never thought to put the security of his own people at the very top of his wish list. All this is the result of the negotiators’ ignorance ...”

“... an indigenous British current of it had got under way, passed from Coleridge and Carlyle to John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold. From this radical-Romantic viewpoint, industrial capitalism was to be condemned for stifling a creativity which the arts, above all, most finely exemplified. Art was the enemy of alienation, craftsmanship the antithesis of ...”

“... mid-Atlantic accents instead of Alcott’s Yankee vernacular. Laurie’s grandfather is played by John Neville, and the scenes, whether meant for Concord, Boston or New York, have that interchangeable Merchant/Ivory, Masterpiece Theatre look. The Anglo-American effect isn’t totally off base. Both ‘Marmee’ and Louisa herself thought of the Alcott sisters ...”

“... and Montenegrins in Albanian-dominated Kosovo, in order to crush his political rivals in Belgrade. John Major’s Government chipped in with a contribution much later on. After resolutely opposing the premature recognition of Croatia and Slovenia on the grounds that this would provoke the outbreak of war in Bosnia, the Major Government capitulated a day before ...”

“... for Isherwood there was a still further peak, Chalmers.’ And much the same message reached John Lehmann, whose Hogarth Press would eventually publish Upward’s first novel: ‘I heard with the tremor of excitement that an entomologist feels at the news of an unknown butterfly sighted in the depths of the forest, that behind Auden and Spender and ...”

“... and social reform. The New School for Social Research opened in 1919: Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey were on the staff; Harold Laski and Lewis Mumford were regular visitors. Located in Greenwich Village, the New School became a centre for music, dance and the visual arts, the place to teach or attend lectures. Much of the credit for putting it on the ...”