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“... addressing himself to Irish history and contemporary politics ought always to bear in mind John Stuart Mill’s provocative remark, that it was not Ireland but England that was the exception: ‘Ireland is in the mainstream of human existence and human feeling and experience; it is England that is one of the lateral channels.’ Of the authors under ...”

“... England (S.T. Bindoff, 1950), England Under the Tudors (G.R. Elton, 1955), Tudor England again (John Guy, 1988), branding the age – see J.A. Williamson’s The Tudor Age (1953) – with the logo of the double rose of the dynasty which, conveniently, coincided with a generous 16th century of 118 years, 1485 to 1603. It is a good question how we would have ...”

“... been better had the artists been more troubled about the new boulevards or less happy at home. John Pope-Hennessy retells in gracious English the tales of stabbing and intrigue which Benvenuto Cellini himself told in vigorous Italian. He adds some facts about sodomy in 16th-century Italy. And he provides an appreciative commentary on such sensational ...”

“... plays cockney wideboys in British gangster flicks. Xan – who shares his surname with Duane Meo, John Self’s ‘whizzkid editor’ in Money – is sardonically described as a ‘Renaissance Man’: he has published a short story collection called Lucozade, and plays rhythm guitar in a Camden café ‘every second Wednesday’. His old man, Mick Meo ...”

“... party to an almost impregnable domination of English politics. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail King Arthur rides up to a muddy peasant and announces: ‘I am Arthur, king of the Britons.’ ‘King of the who? . . . Who are the Britons?’ The ...”

“... she should take the fight all the way to the Democratic convention in August. And then there was John McCain, in what seemed to be a high school auditorium somewhere in Louisiana (even he wasn’t sure: he thought he was in New Orleans, but he wasn’t), addressing a few hundred sleepy geriatrics, struggling with the teleprompter and grinning weirdly at ...”

“... of the play and then to finish on a spectacular death: roles like Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and, above all, Macbeth. Given his long-nourished Anglophobia and the seemingly inevitable collision with Macready which remains the most celebrated event of his career, it may seem odd that Forrest was prepared to stake so much of his reputation on the ...”

“... from ‘Fenians out of jail’, some of whom, like the Irish-American poet John Boyle O’Reilly, were now eminently respectable figures: but ‘They only fawned for dollars on the blood-dyed Clan-na-Gael’ was a just, if unkind comment on the Parnellite use of Irish-American revolutionary organisations for fund-raising. It might be ...”

“... and forth as Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker do in The Spanish Armada. The first page shows Sir John Hawkins writing a dispatch to Walsingham dated from on board the Victory in the North Sea on 10 August 1588. Somewhere to leeward, in spite of the fierce running battle of Gravelines two days before, there were still great bodies of disciplined Spanish ...”

“... modern jest book, which ascribed jokes and smart sayings to well-known figures such as the poet John Skelton or the fool Richard Tarleton. Jest-book-style anecdotes were often transcribed alongside more serious quotations in manuscript notebooks compiled by individual readers. So in 1601, the lawyer John Manningham ...”

“... in Roman chapels, to the development of the Maltese tourist industry (the Oratory of Saint John in the Cathedral of Valletta contains his last and greatest masterpiece), but it owed most to Roberto Longhi, the most influential Italian art historian and critic of the 20th century. Longhi provided a convincing account of the artist’s Lombard ...”

“... in office, President Clinton was more parsimonious in granting pardons than any president since John Adams two hundred years earlier. But he made up for this at the end when he cast aside the ordinary process for handling federal clemency applications and, in the words of the American lawyer Margaret Colgate, ‘enjoyed a final unencumbered opportunity to ...”

“... a wan light on pews reserved for the use of MPs in St Margaret’s, Westminster, are untypical of John Piper. Normally, his stained glass seethes, particularly in Coventry Cathedral, where a Piper sunburst behind the boulder that serves as a font irradiates a great wall of clunky fenestration. In Westminster though, in a building studded with fanciful ...”

“... At the start​ of the war, John Piper – who had made his name as an avatar of high abstraction in the mode of Braque and Mondrian, his paintings hanging among the Giacomettis and Calders in the seminal 1936 show Abstract and Concrete – was struggling to get by. His pictures weren’t really selling, and he was living on the £3 10s a week he still got from his mother ...”

“... and that Little Dorrit is a favourite in the Home Office.’ Lawyers these days doubtless read John Mortimer, and dons read the new university wits like David Lodge and Tom Sharpe. But in any wider competition for the post of English humorist-in-residence, Michael Frayn would surely be a prime contender. Now verging on sixty, his collected plays and ...”