“... follows a remarkable passage: ‘Among the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter ...”

“... by William Manchester, better known for his account of the assassination of his wartime friend, John F. Kennedy, Death of a President. Written in a racy, sometimes sensational style, the book was full of sweeping generalisations about Germany and the Germans, whom Manchester, not least because of his war experiences, clearly did not like. The Krupps were ...”

“... offering a service people really want. Otherwise they will be reduced to the didactic posture of John Reith or Matthew Arnold, pretending to know better than people themselves what is good for them. This idea, in the Thatcherite spring of the 1980s, lent pro-market advocacy its anti-elitist patina. The efficiency argument is just as familiar. Take a ...”

“... For some in the audience, this was more than enough. ‘That means nigger citizenship,’ John Wilkes Booth told his companions. Three nights later, he followed the president to Ford’s Theatre and shot him in the head. On the morning of 11 April, Lincoln met privately with General Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts. The subject of the meeting went ...”

“... Weight puts it in the first subheading of his introduction: ‘Amphetamines, Jean-Paul Sartre and John Lee Hooker’. Which is a nice phrase, even if it’s half-inched from an interviewee in a previous book, Jonathon Green’s flawless oral history of 1960s counterculture, Days in the Life. (In fact Green also used it as a subheading. This feels a bit ...”

“... O’Hara is just one of the ‘comedians of the spirit’. Among novelists, Bloom had no time for John Updike’s sharp analyses of suburban excess (he is accused of ‘churchwardenly mewings’ against Emerson, which may explain his banishment), or Marilynne Robinson, one of the best living anatomists of the tangled relationship between faith and community ...”

“... and a solid track record. Both the DNC hacking story and the one involving the emails of John Podesta, a Clinton campaign operative, involve a shadowy bunch of putatively Russian hackers called Fancy Bear – also known among the technically inclined as APT28. The name Fancy Bear was introduced by Dimitri Alperovitch, the chief technology officer of ...”

“... in these programmes, ‘we had arrived big-time on the political scene.’ Adams and the SDLP’s John Hume together worked out the theological basis for what, after many drafts, was to become the British-Irish Downing Street Declaration of December 1993 – the document which paved the way for the IRA ceasefire of August 1994. The programmes give most of the ...”

“... principles’. The illustrative quotations reinforced this emphasis: ‘The term Whig,’ Lord John Russell said in the 1850s, ‘has the convenience of expressing in one syllable what Conservative Liberal expresses in seven.’ The entry ranged widely over the (mainly pejorative) extensions of the core use, including such delights, now lost, as ...”

“... The text does not, alas, teach how to avoid being beheaded by a king.It wasn’t until 1744 that John Newbery published what is generally thought to be the first children’s book: A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, Intended for the Instruction and Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly … The Use of which will infallibly make Tommy a good ...”

“... serving as a junior spy in Moscow. When asked by Gorbachev, who was on his way to a meeting with John Major, what he did for a living, he claims to have answered: ‘I follow you very closely.’ Alas, the formulation he includes in the text, ‘Я следую вас очень близко,’ is a clumsily literal translation that makes little grammatical ...”

“... books under review belong to very different genres, both of which are relevant to this task – John Willett’s a critical and historical study based on many years as reviewer, English editor and translator of Brecht, Ronald Hayman’s a lively, detailed biography – though the first turns out to be far the more expert, original and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... you prefer the Brady Bunch to the Partridge family, for instance, as Uma Thurman wants to know of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, is simultaneously a test, a cultural allusion and a send-up of the whole idea of culture. The funniest moment in Pulp Fiction concerns Harvey Keitel, come to clean up after John Travolta and ...”

“... 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 ...”