“... feminist and other good causes. Yet claims of this kind can distort the fiction itself. When Mrs John Dashwood, at the beginning of the novel, rudely asserts her right to the succession of the Dashwood property, and persuades her husband to drop his plan to give £7000 to the dispossessed girls, the method by which she achieves her purpose has more to do ...”

“... much of his capital was fictitious) was greeted like a monarch. The fantasist from the Antiguan St John’s was not in a mood for compromise and proceeded to describe the test cricket played in St John’s Wood as ‘boring’. The future, as far as he was concerned, lay with ‘Twenty20’, the shortest version of the ...”

“... society’s early members included David Cecil, Roger Fry, J.B.S. Haldane, Julian Huxley, Augustus John, Keynes, Shaw, St Loe Strachey, Ellen Terry and Wells. Stories appeared in the press about ‘the big cars, the women in striking hats, the well-known Bloomsbury figures making themselves conspicuous in the audience with their unconventional dress and loud ...”

“... enter Gaza to 34 – flour but not yeast, sugar but not coffee or tea. (‘Pasta,’ a querulous John Kerry asked senior Israeli officials after visiting Gaza, ‘what’s wrong with pasta?’) The shortages were biting, particularly after Israel destroyed or damaged tens of thousands of homes, schools and government buildings in its 22-day campaign last ...”

“... ways of thinking, including – or maybe especially – Labour home secretaries. Blunkett and John Reid certainly did. But Theresa May’s long tenure (six years) and apparent comfort at the Home Office suggests that the mindset may have deepened in her case or meshed better with her pre-existing worldview. This includes a powerful resentment towards the ...”

“... nasty-tasting substance that gets put in household chemicals to stop children from drinking them. John Fletcher MacFarlan was an Edinburgh apothecary who started making laudanum in the early 19th century. T&H Smith moved its flourishing morphine works from the Canongate to Gorgie a century later, and went on to supply both painkillers and sterile dressings to ...”

“... that you are married again?’ was another question put to me. I have translated this as ‘Might John [my second husband] mind?’ The romantic fantasy that we can only love one person in the world – a soulmate, ‘Mr Right’ – is alive and well. A couple of years into married life, as part of my campaign for more time off, Raphael and I took a package ...”

“... which appeared in early 1959 only two months after the Hanover show, the artist and critic John McHale alludes to Rudolf Arnheim, who first applied Gestalt theory to art, and cites Paul Schilder on the ‘fragmentary associations’ that we fold into our body images. Similar reflections on the infantile development of the corporeal imago had been made ...”

“... was ascribed to Satan. In the first systematic treatise devoted to the topic, published in 1637, John Sym, a Puritan, was still able to attribute suicide to ‘the strong impulse, powerfull motions, and command of the Devill’. But natural causes were increasingly being blamed: melancholy, a dysfunction of the hypochondriac organs, folly, a foul ...”

“... as a border poll, as permitted under the Good Friday Agreement, is being discussed.The artist John Byrne used to sell replicas of the British army watchtowers that bristled up from the hill tops of Armagh. The fortifications have long gone, and there’s a world of difference between the frightening place Colm Tóibín explored in 1987 in Bad Blood: A ...”

“... sure, the most original case. One of the strengths of pre-theoretical critics like F.R. Leavis or John Bayley is that, as well as occasionally rapping a literary work on the knuckles, they can also convey what is moving or enriching about it without falling back into 18th-century chit-chat about ‘beauties’. Even so, the critics of critique need to remind ...”

“... few cases more sober sources corroborate Procopius’ account: even Theodora’s fellow Miaphysite John of Ephesus said that she came ‘from the brothel’ (porneion), and Potter’s argument that the word could have referred simply to her past as an actress is too generous. There are other things Procopius could not possibly have known, and some he simply ...”

“... everything they had into pressurised wells and pumps. In the thick of this entrepreneurial swamp, John D. Rockefeller recognised that in a free market, voluntary co-operation would always give way to ruinous competition. Assiduously, Rockefeller and his Standard Oil trust integrated the chaotic functions of the oil business, and struck deals with the railroad ...”

“... Truman as president and inherited the Mossadegh problem. The new administration – which included John Foster Dulles as secretary of state and his brother Allen, now director of the CIA – largely endorsed the views of the outgoing team. In a memo written at the beginning of March assessing the situation in Iran, Allen Dulles advised Eisenhower that ‘a ...”

“... meant he was keen to extend the company’s operations into Persia. The court magus John Dee supplied him with ingenious clocks and compasses – Dee was credited with being the first to use the term ‘British Empire’. Then there was Richard Hakluyt, who from an early age was absorbed by cosmography, a peculiar – Dee’s word – Tudor ...”