“... say they are hard to beat. To my shame, I have to admit to a growing inclination to agree with John Major’s once dismaying view that we should understand less and condemn more – as least in the face of Gilmore’s gathering of pop-psychoanalytic excuses for the sorry state of gender relations the world over. In the end the patchwork of woman-hating ...”

“... numbers, and was accustomed to make confident statements entirely without adequate data.’ So John Wyclif’s claim in the 1370s that Oxford had once had 60,000 students but that after the Black Death the number had fallen to fewer than 3000 can be confidently dismissed. The estimate of 98,000 post-invasion excess deaths in Iraq, made by Les Roberts and ...”

“... class system in which he had been raised. Yet he could never claim, like Harold Wilson or later John Major, to be a ‘classless’ political leader, and he had the good taste not to try. When he called himself a radical, it was not insincere, and many of his instincts set him against self-sustaining structures of power and authority. ‘Let us bust open ...”

“... for popular biography, and Marozzi’s book follows works by Harold Lamb, Hilda Hookham and John Ure. History writing at this level seeks to provide us with vivid pictures of how things must have been and even, at times, to allow us to enter the minds of the protagonists. Marozzi opens with an account of Tamerlane on the eve of the Battle of Ankara ...”

“... familiar in Civil War hauntings as well). One who makes regular reappearances is the British spy John André, who was captured at Tarrytown and hanged at Tappan for his supposedly traitorous collaboration with Benedict Arnold. André was an attractive felon: even Americans called him ‘beautiful’, ‘manly’ and ‘noble’, and his charmed memory ...”

“... genial voice of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). The narrator’s name is Silver, as in Long John. She lives with her mother in Salts, in the far north-west of Scotland near Cape Wrath: ‘cliff-perched, wind-cleft’, a ‘Fossil Town’, ‘salted and preserved by the sea that had destroyed it too’. When her mother falls to her death, Silver and her ...”

“... master of ceremonies, unwilling or unable to prevent himself interrupting the proceedings. As John Bayley put it a few years back, one primary object of a Barnes novel ‘is to dazzle and bemuse the reader throughout with the knowledge and reminder that this is a very clever young person writing a very clever and witty novel’. The most obvious ...”

“... Kungsholm, pride of neutral Sweden, was sold in mid-war to America, converted to trooping as the John Ericsson, then sold back after the war to her original owners. In a burst of postwar activity, before the jet age took over, the Americans made the running on the Atlantic. In 1952 the United States, ‘long believed … fast enough to exceed the US highway ...”

“... between being a memory and being only a memory. On 30 December 2003, Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, sat down to dinner in their apartment in New York. They had been married for forty years. They had had their fights, they had thought about divorce, but there they were. ‘Marriage is memory,’ Didion writes, ‘marriage is time.’ Their ...”

“... to be made from them: he cites the popularity of the high-carb, low-protein diets promoted by John Harvey Kellogg and Sylvester Graham with their accompanying special products – cereal and crackers. ‘If you advocate a low-carb diet, the food industry sees you as a problem,’ he writes, suggesting that this is at the root of a backlash against ...”

“... at all. For instance, the contributions of the many Scottish Whigs like Holland’s librarian John Allen, or the historian Sir James Mackintosh, who were drawn into the circle, are left unanalysed. When he writes of ‘Holland House’ thinking this or disapproving of that, he mostly seems to mean Lord and Lady Holland. The book is essentially an ...”

“... the stories in Black Tickets, these ones provide a somewhat over-cultivated performance, such as John Updike is famous for. But there are black tickets to another kind of performance, where the story is indeed all performance, in one of the modes of post-modernist fiction, and voluntarily severs itself from the old modes of observation or criticism of ...”

“... of Christian belief for English thought from Kingsley onwards is receiving attention again, and John Vincent illuminated the historical career of G.M. Trevelyan in exactly that way in the London Review of Books last year. The different social trajectory of Edward Carpenter bears out this analysis, for all the sociological distinctions. It isn’t ...”

“... images of Sacred and Profane Love. She might have mentioned that the name Shaw gave his Superman, John Tanner, an Anglicised version of Don Juan Tenorio (the ‘Don’ being translated into ‘M.I.R.C.’), was by bizarre chance the name of Mrs Patrick Campbell’s father. I think Shaw may have had an unconscious superstitious fatality about names, since, by ...”

“... activist Andreas Malm doesn’t think it is.)In the 1960s, mainstream liberal philosophers such as John Rawls recognised the legitimacy of breaking the law in a spectacular fashion to sway majorities; in the early 1980s, Jürgen Habermas defended resorting to illegal means to stop the stationing of new nuclear weapons. These lessons appear to have been ...”