“... in other words, Eliot secretly dreams not of conserving but of sweeping everything away. As St John of the Cross put it for him in the epigraph to Sweeney Agonistes (in English translation, for once): ‘the soul cannot be possessed of the divine union, until it has divested itself of the love of created things.’ For the foreseeable future, Eliot’s ...”

“... and others merely succumbed to in ignorance, costs both human and material were being counted by John Maynard Keynes, who agonised about working for a government he despised ‘for ends I think criminal’. The war had, indeed, fast become an increasingly disreputable enterprise which with every discarded corpse raised the stakes of peace. Blinded by the ...”

“... English, the one from the Boy’s Own, the other from a bygone England that probably antedates John Major’s, a kind of neo-Edwardian jolly hockey-sticks schtick. He puts – I am afraid – the camp in camp: ‘Muggins here’ or ‘Lean it on the toast rack. And more Darjeeling’ or ‘I wryly reminisced about old Walther Pabst. He and I campaigned ...”

“... Marxist’s heaven? For Miller, the aim of a theory of justice should be to present what John Rawls called a ‘realistic utopia’. Political philosophers should be ‘contextualists’ as opposed to ‘universalists’ and their prescriptions ‘fact-based’ in the sense of acknowledging the findings of empirical psychology and sociology. But, as ...”

“... arrangements Australia had inherited. Above all, in the minds of such conservatives as John Howard, it was designed to maximise Anglo-Australia’s guilt for what happened to the Aborigines; something for which late 20th-century Australians could not be held responsible. This was the ‘black armband’ school of history, a phrase ...”

“... need to read WikiLeaks’s unexpurgated accounts of skulduggery or even the scrupulous novels of John le Carré: to see what a mission really looks like one only has to watch the Al-Bustan Rotana’s CCTV footage, released on the internet by the Dubai Government Media Office last spring. This half-hour of footage is a gift to novelists who idealise the ...”

“... to condemn his Girondin enemies to the guillotine. In the United States, less violently, the young John Quincy Adams used it to portray Jefferson as a French-style revolutionary, and 30 years later, Jacksonian populists turned it with great success against Adams himself. Today, conservative American radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck use it to deny ...”

“... made something out of Elizabeth’s being so upset that he did not come (she had cooked pheasant, John drove to the station) and, more interestingly, out of her decision to grovel rather than embarrass, and annoy, Herman by saying, here is the original letter, why on earth did you pretend to send a carbon? She knew, of course, Herman would never forgive her ...”

“... after which a framing story loops back towards the book’s first sentence. Along with the Being John Malkovich effect that Hemon gets by surrounding Pronek with other versions of himself, all this just about dovetails with his thematic concerns. A sense of ‘stale disreality’ with regard to personal identity afflicts all his displaced characters sooner ...”

“... made a contentious move by including a science fiction story published in 1932 under the pseudonym John Shamus O’Donnell, claiming that there is ‘a compelling case for O’Brien’s authorship’ although ‘no archival material has been found to verify the story’s provenance. Electronic concordancing and corpus linguistics may be of some value here, but ...”

“... story ‘The Animal in the Synagogue’ with the words: ‘Look away, look away, look away.’ John Wray and Nathan Englander in English and Alejandro Zambra in Spanish all have a phrase about the impossibility of getting rid of the creature – and I’m guessing that Etgar Keret has something similar in Hebrew. That’s certainly what Kafka says, to ...”

“... legal adviser and a government minister. Nothing has been done to act on the advice. In 1977 John Gouriet and his Freedom Association tried to obtain an injunction to stop the Union of Post Office Workers boycotting mail destined for South Africa. Gouriet’s lawyers recognised that he had no personal standing and therefore needed the ...”

“... They were the most real, the closest to the earth, to birth and death, to laughter and weeping.’ John Lossing Buck determined that 79 per cent of the Chinese labour force were farmers, with an average family farm of 2.62 acres. (In the United States, 40 acres had always been seen as the minimum for subsistence farming, as in ‘40 acres and a mule’.) This ...”

“... who first tried to assassinate a unionist politician, shooting the hardline Stormont minister John Taylor six times yet failing to kill him. All this meant the Officials could compete with the Provos for support in Derry and West Belfast, but it didn’t sit well with the nominal goal of the movement, which was the reform of the Northern Irish state, not ...”

“... Museum of Modern Art in New York has had a string of such figures, from William Rubin to John Elderfield to Leah Dickerman). Today the more telling split is between modern and contemporary fields (the latter has no exact birthdate – 1970, 1980, 1989), but this is a schism less between the university and the museum than between scholarly curators ...”