“... be reached with the progressive end of the mainstream. Jones favoured reconciliation with the John Bright wing of Liberalism, and in January 1869 won a US-style primary for the Manchester seat over Thomas Milner Gibson, a former MP, by 7282 votes to 4133. It was a promising seat, he was 49 years old and the vanguard of the Lib-Labism or Lib-Radism by ...”

“... appalling kitsch, while members of the Popular Front, including the former Disney animator John Hubley, a leader in the studio’s bitter 1941 strike, considered the movie an example of dangerous formalism, advocating Chaplin as a corrective.) Disney’s contribution to the US war effort – including the fascinating and appalling animated polemic for ...”

“... This sort of deconstructive approach got under way in the second half of the 20th century, when John Wansbrough, the author of Quranic Studies (1977) and The Sectarian Milieu (1978), was a pioneering figure in the attempt to revise the received story. Apologetic and more literalist readings competed for the support of Muslims. Reconciling the surface ...”

“... the basis of expert advice. People are asked to be impartial and to refrain from clinging to what John Stuart Mill called ‘fractional truths’ – i.e. anything like a party line. More widespread still is the tendency to divide democracy into an electoral part, and something else. That something else can be a vigorous civil society, a lively public sphere ...”

“... of $3 million each, the prison makes little economic sense. But Republicans in Congress led by John McCain have said they’ll oppose him and have the numbers to do so. Dick Cheney appears on television, rather than in the dock, keeping the torture ‘debate’ alive. I wouldn’t have bet that diplomatic relations with Cuba would be restored before ...”

“... Essex, a place with a long history of boat-building and Dionysiac boho revels: Francis Bacon, John Deakin and ‘Dicky’ Chopping, who made a fortune designing the dust jackets for James Bond books, all drank in the Rose & Crown on the quayside at Wivenhoe. Constable condensed the dominant myth of the English countryside in his painting of a haywain ...”

“... have descended on us. Their hoofbeats are still ringing in our ears.’ Three months later John Dos Passos reported in Life magazine that the Americans were ‘losing the victory in Europe’. Visiting Germany as an army journalist, he found that Europeans, ‘friend and foe alike, look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are ...”

“... could break out in other friendly states. Asked whether he expected similar unrest in Jordan, John Kerry, who was admirably forthright in calling for Mubarak to stand down, dismissed the idea: ‘King Abdullah of Jordan is extraordinarily intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive, in touch with his people. The monarchy there is very well respected, even ...”

“... of correspondences between colour, shape and sound is ruined under the collective onslaught of John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and ‘happenings’ (Gesamtkunstwerk with a Beatnik twist). These ideas started to gain focus and coherence in the 1950s, just as the technology became available to realise them, and yet this is where Vergo abandons the ...”

“... Then we found out what the modernists were rebelling against.’ Eugenides studied at Brown with John Hawkes and at Stanford with Gilbert Sorrentino, exacting experimentalists who were ‘against order on the whole and against storytelling’. By setting much of his new novel at Brown in the early 1980s, Eugenides returns to the time of the fall; by ...”

“... generally poor affairs, by continental standards. Thomas Farnaby, who edited Seneca’s plays, and John Bond, the editor of Horace, were both schoolmasters and aimed to produce editions which explained what poets meant in terms that could be understood by grammar school and university students. The generation of scholars around Bentley brought about huge ...”

“... States has a right to dictate what happens in Cuba can be traced as far back as the presidency of John Quincy Adams, when conventional wisdom held that Spain’s dominion over Cuba would inevitably give way to the island’s incorporation into the United States. ‘It’s in the neighbourhood’s interest that Cuba be free,’ Bush said when he introduced the ...”

“... and remote much of the time, from medication or drink it seemed, she warmed finally to her task. John Fordham wrote in the Guardian about that night in his obituary of her: She spat out ‘My Way’ with a new ferocity over a racing hand-drum pulse, and ‘Pirate Jenny’, one of her most spine-tingling interpretations, with an edge that rolled back the ...”

“... and Hispanic voters to turn out in unprecedented numbers. He did better among white voters than John Kerry had in 2004, but not by much: Kerry got 41 per cent, Obama 43 per cent. The brunt of the recession has been borne by precisely those groups that supported Obama most: blacks, Hispanics and the young. (In 2008, the 18-29 age group, which usually ...”

“... consequently, Labour should show ‘humility’ and return to Blairism under a different leader. John Rentoul recently wrote in the Independent that the Labour Party has moved ‘to the left faster than the speed of light’. The definition of ‘left’ here is one that few outside Blairite circles would recognise, but it’s still telling. The idea that ...”