“... But his political judgments are not easily separated from his aesthetic and moral ones. Reading John Stuart Mill made him think about the ‘conglomerated mediocrity’ that surrounded him in Britain: ‘the narrowing of men’s minds and energies’, ‘the constant increasing superficiality of life’, and of ‘general human interests’ being ‘reduced ...”

“... Revolution or its principles, and the feeling was mirrored on the other side of the ocean. John Adams told James Madison in 1798 that ‘there was not a single principle the same in the American and French Revolutions.’ Even Jefferson, one of the great American admirers of France, had lost his enthusiasm for its revolution. Many influential modern ...”

“... Luther King Jr had preached, and Jon Ossoff, who had interned with the Georgia civil rights hero, John Lewis, who died last July. (Warnock presided at Lewis’s funeral.) And on the morning of 6 January, both Warnock and Ossoff were declared victors in the Georgia run-offs, allowing the Democratic Party to take back the Senate.Warnock’s victory was ...”

“... hands. Peter Cook’s venture, the Establishment, was taken over by gangsters in 1963; in 1972 John Aspinall sold the Clermont to Playboy as its main London casino. In 1976, George Marks, a jovial Canadian-American property developer with a silver Rolls-Royce, offered to liberate the National Liberal Club from its debts, hoping that he would in return be ...”

“... She has memories of concerts by David Bowie, the Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart, and of Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1987. The protagonist of Donoso’s 1986 novel, Curfew, is based on Víctor Jara, the Chilean protest singer and poet who was among those killed at the stadium. The character in Curfew escapes, only to find himself guilty and depressed ...”

“... told Cushla he’d love to bath her’.Other details are more pointed. Michael takes Cushla to see John Lavery’s Easter Rising painting, The Trial of Sir Roger Casement, which he admires for being ‘so quietly subversive’; we don’t need to hear Cushla say so to know that, in her world, quiet subversion is a category error. Visiting the McGeown family on ...”

“... In Hamnet, O’Farrell has Agnes dwell on the labour and violence behind the making of a pair of John Shakespeare’s animal-skin gloves (‘She thinks of the tools in the workshop, for cutting and shaping, pinning and piercing’). Lucrezia’s embroidery, which she stabs at performatively in Alfonso’s presence, has, she knows, a ‘wrong side’ as well ...”

“... to hallucinate three or four crabs who followed him around for a year. Each morning, he later told John Gerassi, he would greet them: ‘My little ones, how did you sleep?’ He got used to the crabs, but other sea creatures – molluscs in particular – remained objects of horror. Sliminess had something to do with it. Being and Nothingness (1943) concludes ...”

“... changed the name of Black Boy Lane in Tottenham to La Rose Lane. The new name commemorates John La Rose, who founded the Caribbean publishing house New Beacon Books in 1966. Newspapers made sure to find local residents who were angry about the change: such narratives are well oiled; they spin smoothly into motion. Pollard and her ‘unruly ...”

“... in July 2020. Glancingly, the Tate Modern captioning alludes to its insights. The thesis of John Elderfield’s Cezanne: The Rock and Quarry Paintings, which served as the Princeton show’s catalogue (Yale, £35), turned on Cezanne’s formative twenties, prior to his teaming up with Pissarro in Normandy. Back in Aix, his discussion circle had included ...”

“... catastrophe to human sin.* Others took more optimistic lessons from scripture. The geologist John Woodward thought Protestant industriousness would save mankind from sin and restore to the soil the natural fertility lost in the Flood. Barnett argues that the secularising impulses of the 18th century – which separated human history from the natural deep ...”

“... top of the tomb appears in paintings of the dead Christ supported by angels, or by Mary and Saint John, she proposes that the parapet can be read as an altar and is thus ‘the metaphoric equivalent of the tomb and of the Virgin Mother herself, because in each of these Christ was enshrined and from each he was born’. Yet there is no reason to suppose that ...”

“... may or may not exist outside the bounds of his own desire. Seeking her, Jordan allies himself with John Tradescant, the botanist and traveller who was also bent on the pursuit of an exotic ideal. Fiction and history merge in the image of the first pineapple to reach Britain’s shores. Jordan and his mother leave London as the Great Fire is about to purge ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”