“... of duty and the hope that he could shield colleagues more successfully from within the system. John Heilbron called his biography of Planck The Dilemmas of an Upright Man. Stern takes the same line, gloomily but fairly recording Planck’s small victories and large surrenders. To conflicts of conscience was added personal tragedy. One son had been killed ...”

“... temporary hang by a small team led by one of the very best living historians of modern art, John Elderfield, of works of 1880 to 1920 in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. I cannot say much about its most hotly debated section, ‘People’, because my only sight of it was an hour’s visit hot from the airport on the night it ...”

“... an evocative portrait of the now forgotten city that emerged from World War Two. In the words of John Gunther, New York in 1945 was ‘incomparably the greatest manufacturing town on earth’, a city of garment, printing, electronics and many other small firms producing specialised goods. It was also America’s largest port, handling one-third of the ...”

“... trope.Then several things happened. The owner of Books and Bookmen, an operator by the name of John Dosse, took the opportunity of emulating the Masada faction and the Goebbelses, and committed suicide himself. I received a moist letter from the editor of the magazine, written in the tone of ‘I hope you’re satisfied now.’ I was accused in print, by ...”

“... in sum, is our culture’s chief pictorial repository for the so-called human condition. John Rupert Martin, Kenneth Clark, H.P. Chapman and E.H. Gombrich (respectively) were, each of them, writing out of a scholarly knowledge of the 17th century. Nonetheless, their terminologies raise a major problem: does the strength of our emotional response to ...”

“... proponents of such ideas fall into predictable political camps. Joan Smith, quoted by Watt, blows John Berger’s famous dictum that ‘men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ smartly out of the water as just another male fantasy. If they are interested in clothes, women look at other women, because their clothes are more interesting. It ...”

“... the cover, their faded marbled fronts transformed into a bookish reliquary. This was the material John Middleton Murry mined for the selections he called the Journal and the Scrapbook, though it’s long been known that there was no such distinction. Margaret Scott, who is also co-editor of the five-volume Mansfield Collected Letters, has worked for years on ...”

“... che quindi ha poscia sua paruta,                 è chiamata ombra ... In John Sinclair’s translation: and as the air, when it is full of rain, becomes adorned with various colours through another’s beams that are reflected in it, so the neighbouring air sets itself into that form which the soul that stopped there stamps upon it ...”

“... Martin Luther King.’ Even Alexander Portnoy is a trusted aide to New York City’s liberal mayor John Lindsay, a tribune of the Great Society. In the thick of his erotic adventures, he can’t help remembering how he spent his childhood listening to ‘marching songs by the gallant Red Army Chorus’. Still, I Married a Communist addresses the culture of the ...”

“... of ‘Good old Toyners’: later he was fined a pound by the Party. The Cambridge of John Cornford would have regarded such frivolity as monstrous.) He was consistently irresponsible and enjoyed, rather than feared, the thunderbolts that followed. In Brussels in 1945 he used to dress up as a padre in battle-dress and dog-collar: but Miss Mitford ...”

“... David?’ said a poet. ‘Destroying all those beautiful things?’ It would be exciting, like a John Buchan romance, if the Rais of Iraq were to revive the worship of those ancient, aphrodisiac deities. It was good to meet the Governor of Babylon, successor to the prophet Daniel (whose shrine is in Kirkuk, next to Hosea’s), to feast in the open air ...”

“... Orwell took little care of his manuscripts. He didn’t anticipate that collectors of such things would pay real money for them, and that universities would think it a privilege to turn a writer’s bits and pieces into an archive. The typescript used in the printing of Nineteen Eighty-Four is in the Orwell Archive at University College London. There are also preliminary drafts of the novel – pages of handwritten and typewritten material, with corrections and additions – which correspond to a little less than half of the published text: 44 per cent, according to Peter Davison’s estimate ...”

“... ascribing a multitude of experiences to one figure has been vigorously maintained, especially by John Berryman in Dream Songs, though in that case the necessary distinction between ‘Henry’ and Berryman didn’t survive the strain he put on it. In the end, Berryman overwhelmed his creation by falling upon him. Harsent has given his puppet a busy life: he ...”

“... Is ours a bad age for thinking? To take up the last question first, it is worth noting that John Stuart Mill thought of his own age, which we now view with reverence, as not a strong age for thought. He blamed this largely on the educational methods of his day, which featured cramming and rote learning, and produced what Mill called ‘mere knowledge ...”

“... administrative hierarchy. I myself needed no persuading of the wrong-headedness of the campaign by John Hoskyns (who is not mentioned in the lecture) for politicisation of Civil Service appointments, and I think that others will also find the arguments convincing. The lecture describes the close working relationship that can exist between a minister and a ...”