“... and social reform. The New School for Social Research opened in 1919: Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey were on the staff; Harold Laski and Lewis Mumford were regular visitors. Located in Greenwich Village, the New School became a centre for music, dance and the visual arts, the place to teach or attend lectures. Much of the credit for putting it on the ...”

“... and Montenegrins in Albanian-dominated Kosovo, in order to crush his political rivals in Belgrade. John Major’s Government chipped in with a contribution much later on. After resolutely opposing the premature recognition of Croatia and Slovenia on the grounds that this would provoke the outbreak of war in Bosnia, the Major Government capitulated a day before ...”

“... for Isherwood there was a still further peak, Chalmers.’ And much the same message reached John Lehmann, whose Hogarth Press would eventually publish Upward’s first novel: ‘I heard with the tremor of excitement that an entomologist feels at the news of an unknown butterfly sighted in the depths of the forest, that behind Auden and Spender and ...”

“... too much money. Patrick’s defence and successive appeals were paid for by his brother-in-law John T. Milliken, who had married Patrick’s beautiful sister May. Milliken had telegraphed Patrick’s counsel at the beginning of the case: ‘One million dollars, if necessary, for Patrick’s legitimate defence.’ As the case wore on and the defence case ...”

“... mid-Atlantic accents instead of Alcott’s Yankee vernacular. Laurie’s grandfather is played by John Neville, and the scenes, whether meant for Concord, Boston or New York, have that interchangeable Merchant/Ivory, Masterpiece Theatre look. The Anglo-American effect isn’t totally off base. Both ‘Marmee’ and Louisa herself thought of the Alcott sisters ...”

“... the sky, gave the audience a sense that electronic music could work. At the climax, pictures of John Major with an X stamped across them appeared on screens at the back of the stage, drawing the biggest cheer of the festival. After Orbital came the Stone Roses, the band that people had waited five years to see. A band that had defined what it meant to be ...”

“... an indigenous British current of it had got under way, passed from Coleridge and Carlyle to John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold. From this radical-Romantic viewpoint, industrial capitalism was to be condemned for stifling a creativity which the arts, above all, most finely exemplified. Art was the enemy of alienation, craftsmanship the antithesis of ...”

“... Cruickshank, Rowlandson and Dent; and portrayed by Romney, Beechey, Hoppner, Matthew Peters and John Russell. Nor has she been entirely forgotten by posterity. To be sure, she was not even mentioned by name in Percy Fitzgerald’s two-volume life of King William IV, published in 1884. But she merited an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, there ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... But whenever someone new walked in, which they did quite often, they would pull themselves up like John Wayne at the sight of my cue, saying: ‘I’ll show you how it’s done, sweetheart!’ Fatal last words. The trick is to appeal to their protective nature. Respot the colours wrongly, snooker yourself, even miss the ball altogether: they get all misty-eyed ...”

“... Designed to keep the hair from obscuring the vision, it was pulled so tight that, as the veteran John Shipp testified, a soldier could scarcely open his eyes. The Tsar’s soldiers had their queues stiffened by iron bars. But the most hated item of equipment was the neckstock, a kind of heavy leather cravat intended to force the soldier’s head erect ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of bicycle from bad road surfaces, though there were strong men who rode them from Land’s End to John o’ Groats without suffering too many ‘headers’. As everyone knows, the golden age of cycling arrived in the 1890s, with the invention of the inflatable tyre. This was a golden age, too, for the admen, who readily saw that the way to symbolise pneumatic ...”