“... I don’t think they flow from his religious commitment. In giving his own interpretation of John Paul II’s encyclical ‘Faith and Reason’, MacIntyre says: It is characteristic of human beings that, whatever our culture, we desire to know and to understand, that we cannot but set ourselves the achievement of truth as a goal. And among the truths to ...”

“... becomes a little more like a dialogue in the selection of red chalk drawings by William Hodges and John Webber from Captain Cook’s voyages, in which the vigour of the artists’ gaze is checked, and rewarded, by a powerful intimation of life and consciousness in the sitters. Meanwhile a clever association is made between the European interest in exterior and ...”

“... ethnic conflict. American reviewers have been unable to resist comparing Shteyngart’s book with John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces, though the two novels share very little beyond an omnivorous, obese hero who falls for a girl from the Bronx. Temperamentally, Misha Vainberg is Ignatius Reilly’s opposite. Reilly railed against the lack of ...”

“... they’re disparaged at the wedding dinner. Her position in this story is perhaps something like John McGahern’s. ‘The collapse of the Church’s absolute power’ in Ireland, he wrote in ‘God and Me’, an autobiographical essay, ‘has brought freedom and sanity in certain areas of human behaviour after long suppression’, but also ‘a new ...”

“... observation while vindicating Newton’s theory. All went well until the mid-19th century, when John Couch Adams showed that Laplace’s calculations were incomplete and actually accounted only for about half of the observed effect. The apparent agreement between Halley and Laplace was ruined and nationalistic passions inflamed: Laplace was French and Adams ...”

“... required to project a narrative and would be criticised by media pundits if it failed to do so. John McCain had his tale of captivity and endurance; Joe Biden recalled the car crash that killed his first wife and their two young children; Barack Obama had written a bestselling memoir. McCain’s first line of attack was to accuse Obama of being a celebrity ...”

“... not intent on dismantling a philistine industrialism, but on adding a spot of imagination to it. John Stuart Mill did not reject Benthamism; he simply mixed it with a creative dash of Coleridge. The more aggressive choice for art was to beat science at its own game – to insist that it was itself a form of cognition, but one far superior to the reflections ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that becomes even grimmer in Means’s counterfactual telling. When ‘Hystopia’ starts, John F. Kennedy is still alive and is serving his third term as president. But after six unsuccessful assassination attempts, he’s slipped into the thrall of a death wish, which has him conducting coast-to-coast ‘wave-by tours’ in open-air limos and ...”

“... Field’ (1939) It could have survived perfectly well. Perhaps it did, in John Nash’s (Paul’s younger brother) re-doings of Constable country, or Stanley Spencer’s topographies of Cookham. Landscape painting had always been, essentially and productively, nostalgic: the cult of ruins had mutated, on the whole without pain, into a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Sartre and Beauvoir, Jean Genet and others – though none under B for Beckett, and none for John Berger, who was cool at first, then much warmer, coming under fire from David Sylvester – another S – for disparaging Giacometti’s work in the 1950s, and then for revising his opinion after the artist’s death in 1966. ‘Head of a ...”

“... Once called ‘the most mysterious manuscript in the world’ by the medievalist and philologist John Manly, its 240 pages contain illustrations of plants no one can identify, what look to be circular celestial maps (though they don’t correspond to any known constellations), drawings of women with rounded bellies frolicking in baths connected by strange ...”

“... Coleridge’s​ favourite novelist, John Galt, had a gift for encapsulating disgrace under pressure, and his novels of small-town Scottish life are among the early masterpieces of British political fiction. After a life of robust colonial effort, during which he founded the Canadian city of Guelph, Galt – exhausted and impoverished – came back to Greenock and died there in 1839 ...”

“... a different kind of anti-Whig historian – in George III and the Historians (1957), and from John Brewer, whose pioneering attempt to reconstruct the wider political culture of print, public opinion and street theatre in Namier’s home decade of the 1760s was tellingly entitled Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III ...”