“... supra-national (Western) Europe. Has anything changed? Have the fall of Communism, the rise of John Major, and the passing of the war-time generation, made a difference? The average Briton is certainly more Europe-conscious than he was. I do not just mean in the consumption of microwave lasagne, which probably does not exceed that of the toned-down ...”

“... Yet none of this stood in the way of his extraordinary prominence from 1931 to 1945. In a way, as John Strachey observed perceptively, ‘the unresolved themes that ran through his books, articles and speeches ... [were] his main strength. It was just this that gave him his hold over the minds of a whole generation of the British Labour Movement. After ...”

“... he would have seen a writer of rattling good yarns, and a gentleman to boot, in the person of John Buchan appointed Governor-General of Canada, a height to which the creator of She would hardly have dared to ...”

“... adds, skipping over the problem of disputes over what’s to be provided for whom, by lowering John Rawls’s ‘veil of ignorance’. No one knows in advance where they’re going to stand, and exactly how much of what they’ll need when they discover where they do stand. Having agreed to the contract, the state provides ‘the background ...”

“... Kapor, funded in a substantial degree by Steve Wozniak (who started up Apple Computer) and John Gilmore (a pioneer of Sun Microsystems), has supported several hackers who have filed suit against the Secret Service. Steve Jackson, whose company was wrecked when its equipment was seized, is one of them. He has never been charged with any crime – but ...”

“... to his – or was it her? – friends. Social exclusiveness as such is not an issue here: John Röhl and Isabel Hull, following Norbert Elias, have shown what we can learn by looking at court society and the aristocratic milieu. The problem arises when the part is confused with the whole, MacDonogh’s symbol of the 19th-century flight from East to ...”

“... lump together these and other intellectual approaches as if they were identical. In 1993, John Silber, the president of Boston University, promulgated a list of ‘intellectual theories’ his campus would ‘resist’, including such familiar targets as multiculturalism, ‘revisionism’ and deconstruction, and, in an original touch, ‘dance ...”

“... on the wall next to the bed. Back home, she initiates a correspondence under her pseudonym ‘John Ivy’, but the two never meet. Trewe kills himself, leaving a note in which he speaks of his yearning for the elusive woman of the dreams, the ‘imaginary woman’. Ella, too, pines away, and dies bearing the child she has conceived at Solentsea. Some ...”

“... went up. The Utilitarians won the day, The Stones were turned up again to ear-splitting level, and John Donne slunk back with the soon-to-be-bereaved protester to get on with private dying behind closed doors. Logical, of course, but for all that, the lamb tasted raw and rotten to me. It’s possible I take death too seriously. It’s always seemed a momentous ...”

“... gave ‘Reform’ MPs a defining political cause and a leader under whom they could rally: Lord John Russell, dubbed by Parry ‘the greatest Liberal statesman of his age’. Over the next forty years, the Whig-Liberal Party developed a distinct set of policies and, more importantly, an idiosyncratic approach to public life. As might have been expected from ...”

“... Hence the comedy (unintentional? it’s hard to say) of juxtapositions like this: To the St John & Elizabeth [hospital]... Mr Mulvany visited me at 7.45. We had a long talk about the problem of materialism in a modern society. He said he would inject the piles tomorrow and look at the inside of the rectum etc. The diaries, then, show Williams to be ...”

“... ever sent from the New World to the Old, so far as is known, was dispatched from the harbour of St John’s, Newfoundland, on 3 August 1527. It was penned by John Rut, captain of the Mary of Guildford, and sent, courtesy of another vessel, to King Henry VIII. It was an espionage report on the French competition, and recorded ...”

“... the Heseltine campaign for leader in 1990 – Clark, the tycoon James Goldsmith and the zoo-keeper John Aspinall arranged a dinner with Conrad Black, owner of the Telegraph, to try to persuade him to order his (entirely independent) editor to stop backing Heseltine. Black refused, but we are left in no doubt that it is at dinner parties such as these that ...”

“... of Edward Bond directed by Bill Gaskill, or David Storey’s directed by Lindsay Anderson, or John Osborne’s titanic hymn to misanthropy, Inadmissible Evidence, or for that matter, Alpha Beta by Ted Whitehead, Veterans by Charles Wood, The Arbour by Andrea Dunbar, or Caryl Churchill’s plays directed by Max Stafford-Clark, or the plays of Christopher ...”

“... I avoid all worldly fun. Many photographs of the visionary follow, taken by her Polish father. John K. Sagatis, who died, the book alleges, as a result of the wanton neglect of an NHS hospital. These photographs of an aspiring saint are fascinating: reproduced in the degraded colour of multiple xeroxing, they turn Sister Marie into a kind of performance ...”