“... owes something to the personal enthusiasm of successive Conservative ministers of education, Keith Joseph, Kenneth Baker and now, it seems (though he is regrettably attached to the idea of famous names and dates), John MacGregor. It owes rather more perhaps to the HMIs, who in a series of reports have drawn attention to the ...”

“... 19th is anomalous. The analysis of his sexual powers that the American journalist and editor Joseph Lyman was given by a New York phrenologist in 1865 (an extraordinary document) surely – like the horoscopes in our modern press – trades on self-doubt in the subject, and peddles reassurance (and starts off, incidentally, with a sentence in the best ...”

“... were named after him and he was the recipient of mandatory encomia on official occasions. John Lewis Gaddis’s biography is a tombstone-sized tribute, based on unlimited access to its subject and his papers. Not bad for a mid-level policy planner whose most senior diplomatic postings were a brief ambassadorial appointment to Belgrade and an even ...”

“... given that its own life began effectively with a commercial problem. In 1777 the Scottish printer John Bell was flooding the London market with cheap editions of English poets, in defiance of the copyright interests of English publishers. A consortium of London stationers decided to blow Bell out of the water with a set of editions of significant English ...”

“... of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and myriad small islands off their coasts. The late John Roberts, himself a pioneering exponent of world history, acknowledged some of these complexities in his editorial preface to the New Oxford History of England, the even more multi-volume successor, still in progress, to the original and influential ...”

“... before telling me I was the latest visitor in a tradition of literary visitors stretching back to John Milton. He said it very kindly, but I wanted to laugh. However, something high in his red cheeks warned me neither to laugh nor to make any reference to Paradise Lost. I simply smiled and composed my wits and followed him over the black and claret tiles to ...”

“... were published in Austin and composed in Bastrop, in a Greek Revival mansion that once belonged to Joseph Sayers, a former Governor of Texas. Such are the cultural jump-cuts of a career begun as a teenager when Moorcock hacked out Tarzan Adventures, Sexton Blake thrillers and camp-fire yarns of the purple sage. ‘At the age of 17, sitting in a dark little ...”

“... History Reader privileges empirical case studies over theoretical generalisation, omitting the John Sutherland who composed the polemic ‘Publishing History: A Hole at the Centre of Literary Sociology’ in favor of the John Sutherland who compiled ‘The Victorian Novelists: Who Were They?’ – a question he answers ...”

“... Ian Fleming called him the ‘most formidable spy in history’; other admirers included John le Carré, Tom Clancy and General MacArthur. Owen Matthews – whose new biography of Sorge is the fifth to appear in English – is well qualified to write this book: his Ukrainian maternal grandfather was Boris Bibikov, a factory worker in Kharkov who ...”

“... gave ‘Reform’ MPs a defining political cause and a leader under whom they could rally: Lord John Russell, dubbed by Parry ‘the greatest Liberal statesman of his age’. Over the next forty years, the Whig-Liberal Party developed a distinct set of policies and, more importantly, an idiosyncratic approach to public life. As might have been expected from ...”

“... heavily on such Western travellers to Mecca as Ludovico de Varthema, Domingo Badia y Leblich, John Lewis Burckhardt and Richard Burton. While most Western reports pretended to be objective, in some cases this was a pretence only, and Peters would have been better advised to have treated Varthema’s 16th-century Itinerario as a novel about oriental ...”

“... and a startlingly original verbal texture. Good rhymed versions of her poetry have been done by Joseph Brodsky and by Robin Kemball, who translated the whole of Tsvetaeva’s collection The Demesne of the Swans. The late Eve Malleret managed in her French translations to convey, not only Tsvetaeva’s metres and rhymes, but also her stylistic range, which ...”

“... and domestic inflation largely destroyed Truman’s hold on the public, strengthened the appeal of Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communism, and undermined public tolerance for rational debate about foreign policy. The Korean War was an object lesson in what little patience Americans had for a limited war and how essential it was to prepare the nation for the ...”

“... with astonishment seeing the Pater kneel down to put Barbara’s boots on. Though her own father, Joseph Parkes, held advanced opinions, a scene of that kind would be inconceivable in her family. Ben showed his daughter that it was perfectly possible to thrive without conforming, and that a woman could claim her own space in the scheme of things. Just as ...”

“... and the postponement of a physical incarnation of the Analytical Engine reflects this. But in 1855 Joseph Whitworth, a leading engineer, offered to build the machine, on terms generous to Babbage. The latter declined the offer, apparently because government help would also be required. This strange and surely instructive moment is not explained by Mr ...”