“... success. Thatcher’s government was able to satisfy enough of the electorate enough of the time: John Major paid the penalty. The present government has gone on about benefit fraud and claimed that cuts will stiffen the backbone of the poor, but it has primarily justified its policies on economic grounds, claiming that the private sector will pick up the ...”

“... about too much. Every document of barbarism is at the same time a record of civilisation. John Ashbery might write like this if he were a character in Gossip Girl. The best of Seidel’s new poems are weirder and stronger than ever. Only Stevens and Ashbery, among American poets, have settled into old age with comparably candy-coloured gifts ...”

“... Ellroy restages this perverse choreography: ‘I ignored the seat belt sign and jammed to the john. I spent 20 minutes looking for rips and tears in my eyes. The stewardess knocked. I told her I was all right. My bladder swelled. I took a long piss and became convinced I had diabetes. I rolled up my sleeves and examined a spot for metastasisation. My ...”

“... intuitive judgments. Rather, they are often engaged in changing those judgments. Gendler discusses John Rawls’s famous ‘original position’, a hypothetical scenario in which rational agents decide how they will organise their society from behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ that prevents them from knowing their future role in that society. The power of the ...”

“... ability to produce high-class wonders looked like it would never run dry. Both Wootton and John Heilbron bring fresh insights even to the invention of astronomical telescopy, overworked though the field is. The different points from which they start out are revealing: Heilbron imaginatively grounds Galileo’s complex personality and peculiar ...”

“... spring of 1953, during the first ever visit by an American secretary of state to the Middle East, John Foster Dulles made a point of including Cairo on his itinerary. Eisenhower and Dulles wanted Egypt to meet the Europeans halfway, i.e. to settle for something less than full sovereignty; to give Russia the cold shoulder, i.e. to side with the West in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and Christina Onassis, have been huge popular hits. There are wealthy hapless males, too – John Paul Getty III, for example, or Hans Rausing – who never find contentment. And Hamlet can stand for all the privileged sons born into misery at the centre of intrigues of familiar wealth and power. There is a double edge to our attention to the unhappy ...”

“... of science. Prominent among them were drug experimenters such as the renegade neuroscientist John Lilly, who postulated an 11-level model of the mind to explain how his experiments with LSD in sensory deprivation tanks might have plugged him into a cosmic computer, and the psychedelic explorer Terence McKenna, whose DMT and mushroom revelations ...”

“... him in the 1750s. So too, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, agnostic clerics such as John Robinson, the author of Honest to God, David Jenkins, the controversial bishop of Durham, the Scots Episcopalian bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, and the Anglican atheist Don Cupitt belong more convincingly in liberal ranks than with authentic enemies ...”

“... British and American ones) have praised the novel for its dissection of contemporary, post-John Howard Australia, and it’s true that Tsiolkas assembles a diverse cast. What he doesn’t do is make their ethnicity, faith or class count for much, or venture very far into these different worlds: Hector’s friend Bilal is an Aboriginal Muslim, with a ...”

“... family home. Inglis, in fact, hazards a guess that R.G. was the inspiration for the elder brother, John Walker, in Ransome’s We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea. True or not, it reminds us that when Collingwood set out, single-handed, on his ill-fated voyage into the English Channel in 1938, he had a lifetime of risky sailing experiences behind him. Inglis is ...”

“... in this drama: the Imagists – H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington, T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, John Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowell – as well as scores more who had a stake in the continuing vitality of literature, including Yeats, Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The writers, clustered in clubs or ‘gangs’, wanted to ...”

“... In January last year a directive from John Denham, secretary of state in what was then the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, announced that research funding for universities was going to be rethought.* The new system should ‘continue to incentivise research excellence’ and reward ‘the quality of researchers’ contribution to public policy-making and to public engagement ...”

“... 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 ...”