“... de Sales in Geneva, bitterly viewing from his window his former cathedral, now occupied by John Calvin. Silence follows close on The History of Christianity, which was written to accompany the BBC television programmes; the preceding magnum opus, Reformation, is distinguished by its rich inquiries into eastern Europe, and other points usually beyond ...”

“... nation; a few years ago this provoked the almost comically reactionary Liberal prime minister John Howard to inveigh against what he called the ‘black armband’ view of his country’s history (as opposed to the proud Gallipoli view), which launched the popular debate that became known in Australia as the ‘history wars’. The main argument was over ...”

“... throughout a shimmering and ravishing soundscape of layered sampling and electronics created by John Gosling (aka Mekon). Bolton avoids the term ‘gothic’, but it haunts the show. Alexander McQueen has entered that part of the afterlife where Marilyn and Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and Peaches Geldof are ...”

“... The prologue​ of Limonov places Emmanuel Carrère in Moscow, circa 2006, at a commemoration ceremony outside the Dubrovka Theatre, where in 2002 the Nord-Ost hostage crisis ended when the Russian military pumped Fentanyl gas into the theatre, indiscriminately killing well over a hundred hostages along with their Chechen captors. ‘In the centre of a circle, dominating the crowd, standing back and yet still attracting attention’, Carrère glimpses a vaguely familiar figure, holding a candle like everyone else ...”

“... and fumed at a ‘smart-alecky’ review of some avant-garde magazines, deciding it was written by John Willett (its real author was in fact his near-namesake Ian Hamilton, never the warmest admirer of the Scottish avant-garde). He felt too good for the Scottish papers and too isolated for the English ones, though when visitors beat a path to his door they ...”

“... and so on. ‘The old school tie counted even more in Labour than in Conservative circles,’ John Colville observed. Despite the book’s title, he was anything but ‘the inevitable prime minister’. It isn’t just a matter of his undoubted conservatism on the matters listed above. After Oxford he had started to train as a lawyer but got distracted by ...”

“... problem, so long as the poor are better off than they used to be. ‘However rich a society,’ as John Moore, secretary of state for social security under Thatcher, once put it, ‘it will drag the incubus of relative poverty with it up the income scale. The poverty lobby would in their definition find poverty in Paradise.’ As national income rises, the ...”

“... for – not least because the post-apocalyptic world may yet seem to them more all-American, more John Wayne, than the current state of the nation. The zombie genre immerses you in a world of unending threat, where the only human contact is collaboration without closeness, where random cruelty is the rule, and life closes down on you as an experience not only ...”

“... missiles would make both merchant ships and surface warships dangerously vulnerable. (John Nott, for one, was persuaded.) The Americans assumed that the Russians were aiming for a great fleet battle – what other purpose could a large navy have? – but a battle fought largely by submarines and aircraft. Only later did it become clear that the ...”

“... turned up in 1974, and kept Christopher both amused and busy translating his poetry into English. John Silber, who later became a reactionary megalomaniac (first as president of Boston University and then as failed gubernatorial candidate), was at that point a brilliant and progressive dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, also brought in by Ransom. The ...”

“... had one child, a daughter. So he’s a curious – you could almost say implausible – mix of John McCain and Bill Clinton, though a few decades younger than either of them. According to the conventions of stories about fictional presidents, the novel strives to maintain the appearance of bipartisanship; Duncan never tells us which party he belongs ...”

“... architecture. It was completed after his death (in 1852) by another architectural historian, John Henry Parker, who also drew on it for Our English Home: Its Early History and Progress (1860). Despite this encouraging start, the emergence in the later 19th and early 20th centuries of modern history as a university subject did nothing to advance the study ...”

“... are alleged to belong to the ancient Sabean sect whose worshippers give primacy as a prophet to John the Baptist. Depending on the nature of what they are asked to do, I’m told, witches and sorcerers charge at least $400 for a spell or a curse, though the better-known ones can command up to $6000. Spells relate to marriage, love, divorce, good health, job ...”

“... presence in the country involves piping up every ten minutes with ‘Danny Boy’. In his play John Bull’s Other Island (1904), which the prime minister of the day, Herbert Asquith, saw five times, Shaw presents a dismally accurate vision of the Free State that would emerge almost twenty years later: the contempt of the new farming class for landless ...”

“... of their fears and consolations. ‘Nude and Seascape’, though it may nod towards stories like John Fowles’s ‘The Collector’ in its macabre subject matter, raises important questions about the relation between life and art, movement and stasis. ‘A Double Room’ is another story that makes the reader experience discomfort, this time for the ...”