“... 1957 the search for a pay policy intensified. Comparability became more and more of a problem; Sir John Cameron, adjudicating a railway pay claim, declared that the nation ‘having willed the end, the nation must will the means’; it was not an answer any government could for long accept. Government’s increasing concern with wages was accompanied by the ...”

“... discharged. Perhaps this is why some of our writers, given the chance, become performing seals. John Malcolm Brinnin met Capote before his first novel was published and remained close to the novelist for many years,2 increasingly concerned about the extent to which his friend was cultivating his fame at the expense of his art. Brinnin had sponsored Dylan ...”

“... turned to the question of the ‘development’ of the hitherto poor societies. As he says, and as John Sheahan elaborates in his essay in the other volume, the new development economics had from the beginning been critical of existing economics. It resisted what was then, and has once again become, the orthodox insistence on caution, on the need to limit ...”

“... in Who do you think you are?), humorous essays, television plays. His TV adaptation of the John Fowles short story, ‘The Enigma’, was extremely skilful. To the general public he is probably best-known by virtue of the BBC serialisation of The History Man. This caused something of a stir a few years back, partly due to the excellence of the book ...”

“... Stores dividend slips, the club cards, her spare hair nets, small gold safety pins, and a St John’s Ambulance First Aid book.’ Or maybe in the couple of old, badly-mended lustre jugs hanging above? ‘In each you would find something interesting: a small roll of bandage, a coin, a hair clip, a bus ticket or a stub of pencil with a rubber in its end ...”

“... in the mid-Sixties. If Mr Major doesn’t watch out, their successors could easily do the same for John Smith in the mid Nineties. Why, the proprietor of the Sun and the News of the World may already be rummaging through his attic even as I write, in the hope of finding that long-discarded bust of ...”

“... world: on his use of Mandeville’s Travels and the Chronicle of the well-travelled Franciscan, John of Marignolli, she is tenacious and persuasive. She speculates convincingly about the explorer’s knowledge of the St Brendan legend and unconvincingly about the effects of the Sinbad tradition. Frustratingly, though, she leaves the job ...”

“... patterns. He pinpoints the birth of traumatic memory to a machine-made disaster, the train crash. John Erichsen was perhaps the first physician to describe the syndrome in the 1860s while examining victims of British railway accidents; he called it ‘railway spine’, and attributed it to vaguely defined neurological mechanisms that originated in dorsal ...”

“... Wilde himself – that she makes the occasional mistake. For instance, there is no evidence that John Gray was ever Wilde’s lover, or that his disagreable domestic companion Raffalovich was ever (whatever this would be) a ‘Dominican monk’. The National Gallery in London is cheerfully muddled with the National Portrait Gallery. The familiar Gospel ...”

“... organisation with anti-semitism and anti-Catholicism. Half a century later, Cobb County elected a John Bircher to Congress five times; it is now represented by Newt Gingrich. Although a 1967 Supreme Court decision finally overturned the Georgia state law that barred racial intermarriage, in 1986 the Supreme Court upheld a Georgia statute outlawing consensual ...”

“... Lincoln argued, looked on slavery as a permanent part of American life. Southern leaders like John C. Calhoun, by contrast, claimed the Constitution not only recognised the legitimacy of slave property but obligated the federal government to protect it. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison agreed with Calhoun. On 4 July 1854, in one of the most ...”

“... goddess never left the plucky Eisenhower country mapped by these ‘artworks’. Everyone from John Baldessari to the Rev. Howard Finster recombines tulle and Disney, winged sunglasses and King Kongs with the truly scary hairy monster which has been bought 800 million times. The introduction is helpful about that figure: ‘imagine the population of India ...”

“... homosexual “submission”, can complete a genital act “in expressing a power relationship”. John Boorman’s film Deliverance makes striking use of this theme in depicting the maltreatment of urban “trespassers” by rustic hunters.’ It is this modern view of penetration, universalised by human-zoo logic, that makes the ancient phallocracy ...”

“... topography all right, and you have only to compare his work with other professionals in the field, John and Anne Nuttall in their Mountains of England and Wales (1990), for example, to appreciate his mastery. Their drawing style is rectilinear whatever the subject; rocks become blocks and right-angles creep into the skylines. Wainwright does much subtler ...”

“... The Spanish Labyrinth – until he was 50; South from Granada, his two autobiographies, St John of the Cross, Thoughts in a Dry Season and his two novels, were written between the ages of 60 and 85. In his unfailingly modest way, he made little of this achievement, and especially of the amount of work he put into his books. He wrote and rewrote ...”