“... The membership of environmental organisations in Britain is double that of the political parties and three times that of Sunday worshippers in the Church of England. Each of us has some links with the green movement and each of these books reflect one or other of these concerns. Everyone outside the farming industry is outraged by its subsidised destruction of woodlands, hedges, wetlands and wildlife, as well as by the pollution of water sources by nitrogenous fertilisers ...”

“... a huge majority, Gollancz started up the Left Book Club. Here were three socialists – Gollancz, John Strachey and Harold Laski – meeting in a restaurant and establishing a publishing venture which would, over ten years, produce and sell six million books, most of them new, and all of them aspiring to a social order where the common interest would ...”

“... the recommendations, in whole or in part, of the Commission on Social Justice, appointed by John Smith and chaired by Sir Gordon Borrie, instead of trying to think the unthinkable. The third reason is that a Third Way, as an organised body of principles, is really not possible. No political theorist, however distinguished, can act as though the country ...”

“... successive British Governments were well aware of this, as were the Unionists. In 1993, however, John Hume’s talks with Gerry Adams reached the point where an unconditional cessation of IRA violence became a real possibility and the Major Government was persuaded by Dublin to open the way for such a development by committing itself publicly to the Irish ...”

“... O’Brien, reviewed in the present issue, dramatises the experiments and predations of the surgeon John Hunter, founder of the Hunterian, as he sniffs out his raw material – including one of the ‘Irish giants’ who showed themselves to the crowd for a fee in 18th-century London. The new, modern sensitivity to these abuses grows out of the corpse of ...”

“... and to co-ordinate and finance standing armies. Nearly a decade ago, in The Sinews of Power, John Brewer undermined the foundations of this view of British exceptionalism with his portrait of an 18th-century British state that was, in key respects, large, strong, militarised, modern and highly bureaucratic. The British Navy, no less than Continental ...”

“... She seems sometimes to have been surprised and disconcerted by the pain dial she could inflict. John Gwyther, the curate Eliot had known in nearby Chilvers Coton throughout the 1830s, was all too easily recognisable in the hapless Amos Barton. In 1859, Gwyther wrote a pained and laborious letter explaining that his ‘Eldest Daughter’ had spotted the ...”

“... and China in particular, sells books in the West and always has done. Marco Polo knew this, as did John Mandeville, that great early impresario of the exotic. It has appealed at a general level as a substantial, unknown space into which, with the right promptings, the individual imagination could rush, expand, unfurl and luxuriate. More specifically, it has ...”

“... the relation between theories of justice and conceptions of institutional design. Waldron faults John Rawls for treating the institutional question only for the case of a ‘well-ordered society’, one whose members are agreed on the fundamental principles of justice and committed to supporting institutions that conform to them. He argues that since there ...”

“... Democrats. (We may fancy we recognise in Andrew some aspects of Tarn Dalyell and of the late John P. Mackintosh.) Then there is Ray the precocious boy from Leeds who joined the Labour Party because of his anger about his granny’s pension; since the young Ray was not precocious about girls, his sexual naivety is a serious handicap to him as an MP, when ...”

“... bureaucratic form, a five-man committee in Frankfurt, later supported by the High Commission under John McCloy, chose the latter option. But that deception, too, eventually ran out on them, and they then fell back on a CIC invention, The Rat Line to South America, originally conceived by James Milano and Paul Lyon for the virtuous purpose of rescuing former ...”

“... Gardeners and, even less, flower painters are not usually thought of as leading adventurous lives. Their pursuits above all others are suggestive of peacefulness, of contented days quietly tucked away in hothouses and arbours, with no greater dangers to contend with than pricks from rose-bushes or stings from wasps. Yet it has never been like that entirely ...”

“... art or of accident’? That formulation is C.S. Lewis’s; Ricks goes on to examine a paragraph of John Aubrey who, he says, ‘thrusts upon us a choice between apprehending his prose as genius or as ingenuousness’. It is not a choice I have felt myself forced to make. Aubrey is a remarkable and delightful writer; ‘felicity’ – Ricks’s word – there ...”

“... is still fluid and uncertain. There are not many scholars who can turn so easily from Scaliger to John Ashbery. Modern critical writing, too, is strongly represented, much of it unknown to me. I am used to the citation of books I have never read, but the very copious notes to Kinds of Literature refer again and again to scholarly works, apparently of great ...”

“... of a civilisation that brought about discontent with life.’ In one of his more polemical moods, John Stuart Mill remarked that ‘there is no difficulty in proving any ethical standard whatever to work ill, if we suppose universal idiocy to be conjoined with it.’ I see no reason why the editors of the Standard Edition should be held responsible for that ...”