“... coincided with what critics have identified as the ‘epistemological break’ in his work. John Lahr, in his 1984 essay on Allen, wasn’t the first to take the view that the comic’s early films, thin narrative skeletons on to which Allen could graft his anarchic one-liners, were somehow more honest. After the break, according to Lahr and many ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and rent a video while you did your laundry in machines named after movie stars; mine was called John Belushi. At 8.30 a.m., groups of kids in tie-died grunge were guzzling beer and nachos, and watching Rodney Dangerfield deliver double entendres about policemen’s balls on the big video screen. But Natalie and I had a running battle over my reluctance to ...”

“... community after talks between the Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams, and the SDLP leader, John Hume. Milltown was thus the feared or presumed setting for a showpiece atrocity, the funeral a shop-window for Loyalist marksmanship and ordnance-nous. It was a cold afternoon, but tension just shaded it, driving out the cold. The air above the city was ...”

“... normally followed by a Hardyesque nemesis, and fall to the old social station, suggests that John Jorrocks, preposterous though he may seem, is a more realistic conception than Michael Henchard. Jorrocks is elected to the Commons at the end of Hillingdon Hall, but Surtees never wrote a sequel. Gash feels that ‘it requires, perhaps, some effort of the ...”

“... and Edgar Allan Poe had their addiction to opium, Pope his lameness, Cowper his depression, John Clare his insanity.’ Family disasters fed the desire for dark afflictions: her brother’s epilepsy, the death by drowning of a sister, like Browning’s Evelyn Hope ‘sixteen years old when she died’. Life and literature became inextricably tangled for ...”

“... left in England, Waugh would say: he can tell the exact figure by checking the sales of books by John Betjeman and P.G. Wodehouse, or by the turn-out for a West End revival of The Pirates of Penzance. And, out of town, there are still a few pockets of decency and calm; there are still a few country churches where the priest uses the word ‘God’ more often ...”

“... to observe the sorting of the ashes, has been rightly praised. I also enjoyed his letter to St John Ervine in response to the news that Ervine had lost a leg. He told Ervine it reminded him of the time in 1898-9 when he himself had been on crutches and dragging a useless limb about. ‘Now do those eighteen months stand out in my memory as a period of ...”

“... approach. The most notable example is the great contribution to the theory of justice presented by John Rawls, who pioneered the revival of the contractarian approach, but has increasingly stressed the universalist concerns of a Kantian concept of ‘the person’ (especially in his 1980 Dewey Lectures*). The recent emergence of the so-called ‘Bob Geldof ...”

“... absurd posturing ninny. Yet this was also the Golden Age of Spanish literature, the century of St John of the Cross, Lope, Quevedo, Góngora. Byron has read widely in the secondary literature and he deftly captures the multiple contradictions. He is also good at the set-pieces, such as the Battle of Lepanto or the horrors of an Algerian jail. As one reads ...”

“... shy: she could even invite herself to tea with a famous stranger, the reluctant and unenthusiastic John Galsworthy. But in spite of the advantage of her looks and social courage she could not, in Forster’s sense, ‘connect’. She attributes this to ‘lack of insight into the lives of others. I was curious, I “observed” them, but was insensitive to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”