“... precedence. ‘His Lordship affected more aristocracy than befitted his years or the occasion,’ John Galt thought, and Hazlitt agreed: ‘He may affect the principles of equality, but he resumes his privilege of peerage, upon occasion.’ Gilmour is nearer the mark to see in Byron’s touchiness and bumptiousness not the toff reverting to type, but rather a ...”

“... or literature in society’. And a decade ago, when controversy over the curriculum was at a peak, John Guillory added that debates about literary and artistic canons merely disguised the simple fact that they weren’t very important to anyone’s self-fashioning. By the late 1990s the humanities appeared marginal even to the universities, driven as they were ...”

“... all Conservatives were similarly opposed to doctrine and ideology. To choose just two examples, John Buchan, like Disraeli a novelist and Conservative MP, maintained in the 1920s that Conservatism was ‘above all things a spirit not an abstract doctrine’. And ten years later, Stanley Baldwin warned a Canadian audience not to change the basis of their ...”

“... August 1517. There the ageing maestro showed them three paintings: two of these, the enigmatic St John the Baptist and The Virgin and Child with St Anne, are now in the Louvre; the third, which is almost certainly the Mona Lisa, was described by de Beatis (and, it is implied, by Leonardo himself) as the portrait of ‘a certain Florentine lady, done from life ...”

“... Man?) good looks made him, too, a valuable commodity at the Caroline Court. This was John Churchill, toy boy of the Duchess of Cleveland, one of Charles II’s discarded mistresses. Churchill, too, was treading a familiar trail: his elder sister was the Duke of York’s concubine. They married secretly, against the wishes of both families, and ...”

“... have latched onto the issue. ‘Bioethicists are to ethics what whores are to sex,’ Richard John Neuhaus wrote in the conservative periodical First Things. Dan Callahan, a founder of the Hastings Center, told the New York Times: ‘This is a semi-scandalous situation for my field.’ The Center for Science in the Public Interest issued a press release ...”

“... According to Henry James, reviewing John Cross’s life of George Eliot, the creations which brought her renown were of the incalculable kind, shaped themselves in mystery, in some intellectual back-shop or secret crucible, and were as little as possible implied in the aspect of her life. There is nothing more singular or striking in Mr Cross’s volumes than the absence of any indication, up to the time the Scenes of Clerical Life were published, that Miss Evans was a likely person to have written them; unless it be the absence of any indication, after they were published, that the deeply studious, concentrated, home-keeping Mrs Lewes was a likely person to have produced their successors ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... has never been about law in the way that written constitutions usually are: it is what John Griffith calls ‘a political constitution’, so that what counts is not what long dead founding fathers or living dead lawyers say you can do but what the electorate will, in your judgment, allow you to get away with (perhaps eventually thanking you for ...”

“... rightly thinks this to be probably apocryphal, without adding that the remark was first made by John Wilkes in the 1760s when it had more political relevance. None of the set saw active service in the 1914-18 war. They were either too old – the youngest was 32 – or too unfit, but Waldorf Astor insisted on joining the Army and was put in charge of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and sparkle dust. With colours like Hummous and Guacamole, you know you’re in Islington. John Oliver in Notting Hill is the epitome of Posh Paint, elegant, with shelves of leather-bound sample books, like an aristocratic library in a gentleman’s or ladies’ club. Here the paints are called Shrinking Violet, Purple Heart, British Navy, Betty ...”

“... by a story that we know either to be true (analytic literature) or to be made up (fiction). As John Bayley once remarked, writing about Iris Murdoch, it is bound to be a tautology to talk about ‘freedom’ in a novel, in which only the author is free to do as he likes. Pushkin, and Tolstoy following him, liked to emphasise that their characters ‘took ...”