“... Marsh Arabs. As well as the interview with Thesiger, there is one with another ‘post-imperial John Buchan character’, David Stirling, who added that new regiment to the Army. The interview is dated 1974, a bad year in Britain, when Stirling launched an organisation to train people to keep sewers and power stations operational in emergency. He had ...”

“... much of the grimly persuasive work leading up to it. The Frankie of the title was once called John: he’s a grotesquely blotched and ugly writer of horror novels who adopted his monstrous nickname while still at school, as part of a strategy of self-protection which also led him to discover the power he could wield by inventing repulsive stories (‘Do ...”

“... The sharpest comment in Freud’s Women – a huge book, but consistently readable – comes at the end. It would be eccentric, say the authors, to conclude after five hundred-odd pages that Freud’s significance for women lies in his having been the first equal-opportunities employer. Eccentric, but rather tempting because, in his famously ambivalent way, he left such a paradox behind ...”

“... There are less unexpected points in the other essays and it is a pity that one of them claims John Knox as the father of Scottish Presbyterianism, and another contrasts ‘history’ with ‘herstory’. Points can be made without insulting the English language. From Glasgow Presbytery in 1960 comes a remark on women’s ordination: ‘every religion ...”

“... and rewarding job. He gravitated gently to Sydney, Australia, where he became a friend of the Rev. John McKnight, a rector in a slum area. Under McKnight’s influence, he moved towards Christian ideas. He liked the way McKnight applied his religion to the real world, and shared the rector’s horror of nuclear weapons. ‘Christians,’ said ...”

“... looks pretty lively in Late Medieval Britain, including most tomb effigies pictured here; even Sir John Golafre’s grisly skeleton in its shroud has lost its power to concentrate our minds on the Great Leveller, if that is what it was intended to do – I have my doubts. I also have them concerning the opposite case. Mr Platt’s admirable discussion of the ...”

“... in so much recent fiction is striking. What happened to the suburban novel of a generation ago? John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy charted the suburban ascendance more or less as it was happening, and the popularity of those books was perhaps some measure of confidence in the life we were living. Now that suburbia is a place where property values can sink ...”

“... cultural ascendancy was beginning. These artists – George Luks, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, John Sloan and George Bellows – had all (Bellows apart) started out in the 1890s as newspaper sketch-artists in Philadelphia. Drawn together by the magnetic preaching of Robert Henri, a slightly older painter who had returned from art school in Paris to his ...”

“... the ‘Italianisation’ of Spanish politics, and the normally judicious Guardian correspondent, John Hooper, wrote darkly of the re-emergence of the two Spains that had so savagely fought each other in the Civil War. A government based on policy agreements between several parties is of course less stable than one based on a single party with an overall ...”

“... make the effort to interpret [texts] as having unity’. An instance of cohesion: ‘John Maynard Keynes, the century’s most influential economist, once said that in his utopia members of his profession would be like dentists – useful but humble people. Utopia may be arriving with the administration of President-elect Bill Clinton.’ What ...”

“... Kiggell papers, but the General rates only one passing mention in the text and Brigadier-General John Charteris, Haig’s overoptimistic chief of intelligence, is absent from the book. Both men were ‘unstuck’ when it was too late to matter. After the war Sir Lancelot Kiggell was sent to govern Guernsey. On the Home Front, we are told, there were only ...”

“... of climatic change. This tradition has been continued recently among Anglophone historians by John Pryor’s analysis of how the patterns of weather, winds, currents and coastal topography in the Mediterranean shaped its economic and military history, by Keith Thomas’s Man and the Natural World and by the work of Donald Worster and Alfred Crosby. If ...”

“... the novel was published, Rayner’s father died, and his name was misspelled on the coffin, ‘John Bertram Raynor’. Rayner writes in The Blue Suit: ‘he was cremated as he’d spent much of his life – with a name not exactly his own.’ There are more than two fathers here, more than just the real and the fictional or the two put together. They are ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... body to body, remains consistent. ‘It was not sex,’ but neither (to pick up an echo from John Donne) was it a mixing of souls. In ‘The Missing’, Gunn writes of his friends as ‘an involved increasing family’ (another family) of gay lovers: Contact of friend led to another friend, Supple entwinement through the living mass Which for all that I ...”