“... No politician stands out as a villain in the Gillmans’ interesting series of revelations. Sir John Anderson, blamed over this and much else at the time, in fact fought hard to keep internment to a minimum (and no one denied that some people had to be ‘collared’). If Churchill was a hard-liner in the early summer of 1940, it was not many months before ...”

“... of President Wilson, the pinnacle of American prestige in the world, and to their reassertion in John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural speech. The Senator for New York, as he now is, has served four Presidents, and acted as American Ambassador to India and the United Nations. He is engaging, witty and learned; his prose has the facile deliciousness of Bourbon ...”

“... been a continuity of hope for the future, a hope embodied in countless prophetic declarations from John Winthrop’s ‘We shall be as a city upon a hill’ onwards. And of these declarations the Declaration is – and in spite of Wills’s argument remains – the chief. Its mode of prophecy is indeed peculiarly Jeffersonian. And in supplementing previous ...”

“... it is true that some American magazines, notably the New Yorker, have welcomed the talents of John McGahern, Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, Edna O’Brien and Benedict Kiely, among others, one could give long odds against a manuscript by an unknown Irish novelist or poet seeing the light of first publication in Boston or in New York.So it’s back to London ...”

“... Wat Tyler (by Ros Faith), observations on George V’s Silver Jubilee as celebrated in Kenya (by John Lonsdale), a powerful dissection of the problems of writing the history of the Communist Parties (by Perry Anderson), and reference to an Italian cowherd who constructed his own version of the Odyssey because he found the original too long to memorise. There ...”

“... normal rates of productivity. Lambert’s investigations in Victorian literature are like the work John Sutherland has issued over the last decade on the publishing history of Victorian fiction: a fresh, vigorous and definite line of attack, which couldn’t possibly occupy the energies of a whole academic establishment. That establishment does not look very ...”

“... as a narrative by rendering a complex story comprehensible. Ludendorff, Von Kluck, Joffre, Sir John French, King Albert of Belgium – all come, in Tuchman’s portrayal, to embody the characteristics of the nations to which they belong. We feel that we are seeing a modern morality play re-enacted before our eyes. History takes on a meaning that most ...”

“... Virgin and Child, and an object resembling a hairy man – ‘some say a hermit, others think John the Baptist.’Kircher’s contemporaries puzzled over fossilised animals and their distribution. The Walloon mathematician René-François de Sluse wrote to the Royal Society in London enclosing a sketch of stones resembling shellfish: ‘It is strange that ...”

“... of the American police in the late 1990s. It is striking how closely his story resonates with John Kani’s account of being arrested after a rehearsal of Othello in apartheid Johannesburg in 1987 and interrogated about his onstage relationship with Joanna Weinberg’s Desdemona.If there is an intellectual faultline in Little’s collection, it is between ...”

“... of the economy to the Americans. ‘A Bell for Italy’ was the title he gave his report, after John Hersey’s 1944 novel set in war-torn Sicily, A Bell for Adano. He prefaced it with an epigraph from Lao Tzu: ‘True foundation cannot fail.’ Then:Italy neither asks nor wants to live on the charitable generosity of the United States of America … We ask ...”

“... or ‘our country’ ‘brings everyone into the family as it were’ – Kipling’s only son, John, had been posted missing in September 1915.B. 104 forms were sent from army records offices. By 1916, twelve offices had been established in Britain and Ireland, each commanded by a colonel or lieutenant colonel who, in a large office such as that at ...”

“... over-optimistic speech from 1992, seven months after the Conservatives had been re-elected under John Major, Benn says: ‘I have a feeling that the 1990s are going to be quite different. The whole … selfish philosophy is in retreat.’ And in a book extract from 1979, he insists that ‘the Labour Party has been, is, and always will be an extremely ...”

“... and its vicarage sit on a large parcel of land. (As Tawney might have predicted, the vicar, John Perkins, a bookish man who kept a lock on his study door, is far from being a spiritual leader.) Poorer dwellings are shown by dense clusters of tiny red dots, often in more remote areas. ‘A house with a lean-to’ yields a cache of information about a ...”

“... contaminated by that terror.Abstraction does not lend itself to satire. The once savage collagist John Heartfield, lost without his galère of targets, became well-mannered. Few were able to bring with them so much as a fraction of their past work. And the ethos, the society and the gallery of subjects peculiar to that society dispersed, vanished into ...”

“... Vasari coined the name ‘Fra Angelico’ a hundred years later. In 1982, he was beatified by Pope John Paul II, which is why Italian audiences now call him Beato Angelico – not just angelic, but blessed.With more than 140 pieces on display, the exhibition has enough material to chart the full arc of his career. The works are arranged broadly ...”