“... on the supine condition of the British people, seemingly blind to the faults of their political masters. ‘As to that popular humour which is the medium we float in … it is far worse than I have ever known or could imagine it.’ In the face of public passivity, Burke concluded, even the most coherent opposition stood little chance of storming the ...”

“... pattern with Johns. About one fifth of all males in the UK between 1800 and 1850 were christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so ...”

“... paying the highest price in the loss of the lives of our young soldiers – almost alone. I’m John Kerry and I approved this message. In a world of instant projections and medium-is-the-message contemplations, commentary on the presidential race of 2004 might finish right there: Kerry’s style is downbeat, America-blaming, slightly depressing, while the ...”

“... who warmly sympathised with Hitler’s politics. (How many of these people also know that John F. Kennedy was an early supporter of America First?) But the underlying question was not whether Trump was giving a secret signal to anti-Semites – among his biggest supporters are the prime minister of Israel and the mayor of Jerusalem – but rather what ...”

“... of military occupation. In Fire on the Mountain Terry Bissell posits a world in which a successful John Brown’s raid sets off a black revolution in the American South which leads to the formation of a socialist state, ultra-modern and prosperous, in contrast with the shabby private-enterprise North that limps along on the crumbs of world trade. But what if ...”

“... whom they forgive.It wasn’t that he was particularly good-looking – according to his friend John Lehmann he was ‘a great, untidy, sprawling figure of a young man’. Virginia Woolf blamed his lack of looks on his father’s family: ‘He had a strong element of the Bell in him. What do I mean? I think I mean that he was practical & caustic & shrewd ...”

“... three’ of the Reinagle sisters in 1807 and noted their unsentimental approach to copying the Old Masters. ‘They work very quick, & said, “Picture painted one day; sold the next; money spent the third.”’) Training sometimes began early. Helena Beatson, Read’s niece and pupil, presented her first narrative scenes at the age of eight at the 1771 ...”

“... Falklands, where lightning can ignite the tussock-grass in spring. You can make a case for John Davis or Sir Richard Hawkins, just as if you are not English you can make a case for some earlier Iberian voyage. The articles ‘Falkland’s Islands’ in the last two editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica give the honour to the English as if there was ...”

“... I looked fat, dull and unmanly. The achievements of others, particularly those of my older brother John, stood in for anything that I might achieve myself, and afterwards a series of distinguished men were to step into John’s shoes. I acquired a spectacular ability to not see, identify or shrewdly evaluate people or ...”

“... normal: ‘I wasn’t marked off from the other children as a literary sissy like Yates [sic] and Masters.’ In an interview with Richard Poirier for the Paris Review in 1960, a few years before his death, he reiterated that he hadn’t had ‘a very literary life’; he didn’t keep up with reviews or gossip. He told Poirier that when he first visited ...”

“... very soon, I lose the markers by which I have navigated, the beacons by which I know myself. Like John Clare leaving the tight circle of experience around the village of Helpston (then in Northamptonshire), I step out of my knowledge, to the tottering edge of an abyss known as ‘the future’ or ‘the human contract’. Mortality. Of place and ...”

“... vampire’s quid’); Digital Assets Holdings, another blockchain company, is run by Blythe Masters, the English former J.P. Morgan executive who did more than anybody else to pioneer the credit default swap, the dazzlingly ingenious new financial instrument which was a huge success until it nearly destroyed the global financial system.7 This is just a ...”

“... The American author of the words, Anna Walker, is invoking the declaration of Christ himself (John 9:4): ‘I must work the works of Him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.’ Good works in this general sense could be performed by an invalid Evangelical lady, flat on her back but radiating piety. There has, however, been ...”

“... ship was put back on an even keel. Curiously, although the Grosart debacle, fully documented in John Bicknell’s edition of Stephen’s letters, is briefly mentioned in Alan Bell’s exemplary entry on Stephen in the ODNB, these misdemeanours make no appearance in Arthur Sherbo’s entry on Grosart. Thereafter, the DNB maintained its announced schedule ...”

“... social life. The major single piece of progress has consisted in a documentary discovery made by John Shearman and Webster Smith. They showed that the painting originally hung not in the villa of Castello, which belonged after 1477 or 1478 to Lorenzo’s cousin, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, but in Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco’s city house – a ...”