“... often indulged friends or relatives. (Play It as It Lays was scripted by Dominick’s brother, John Gregory Dunne, and his wife, Joan Didion, and was an adaptation of Didion’s warning novel on Hollywood.) But he threw parties, and for a few years real class people came, and he took their pictures. He hadn’t set out to be a studied photographer, but he ...”

“... like the universities but has evinced no other signs of wanting to endanger the status quo. John Prescott appears a broken reed – but could benefit from the spending review. Margaret Beckett, the minister most responsible for Parliamentary reform, has been an almost complete failure. The David Blunkett of Sheffield Council days is scarcely ...”

“... Sikhs. This was the task, assigned to two young personal assistants, Major Woodrow Wyatt and Major John McLaughlin Short. Wyatt was an ebullient, high-living Labour MP, whose political career was to describe a long arc from the socialist Left to the Thatcherite Right. His main job was to keep open the line to the Muslim League. Short was an expert on the ...”

“... an evocative portrait of the now forgotten city that emerged from World War Two. In the words of John Gunther, New York in 1945 was ‘incomparably the greatest manufacturing town on earth’, a city of garment, printing, electronics and many other small firms producing specialised goods. It was also America’s largest port, handling one-third of the ...”

“... the failure to conclude an agreement as the ‘greatest disappointment’ of his administration. John Kennedy came closest to success when the Limited Test Ban Treaty came into force on 10 October 1963, just a few weeks before his assassination, though that treaty, which prohibited nuclear tests in the oceans, atmosphere and space, did not prohibit ...”

“... proponents of such ideas fall into predictable political camps. Joan Smith, quoted by Watt, blows John Berger’s famous dictum that ‘men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ smartly out of the water as just another male fantasy. If they are interested in clothes, women look at other women, because their clothes are more interesting. It ...”

“... a significant new biography of Captain Cook by Nicholas Thomas, and many other substantial works. John Sugden and Andrew Lambert have just produced biographies of Horatio Nelson, and a further biography by R.J.B. Knight is eagerly awaited. The Royal Navy is doing very well, thank you. Moreover, all kinds of scholar, many of them not British, have discovered ...”

“... Lucia spent the last thirty years of her life in the psychiatric hospital in Northampton in which John Clare had been detained a century before. She died in 1982. If her father was unusual among the great Modernist writers for the resolute ordinariness of his art, he was also exceptional for his anti-tragic vision. There is no real tragedy in Joyce’s ...”

“... always took around with him. (At one point he could eat only Bengers baby foods.) His portrait by John Singer Sargent, which adorns the cover of this volume, makes him look, in the view of Sargent’s biographer, like ‘a business executive’. He attracted neither the adoration nor the hatred that was directed at the more charismatic Curzon and ...”

“... in Paris in 1919 to make peace with more understanding than many previous writers, following John Maynard Keynes, have done. The sudden end of the war surprised most Allied leaders, who had anticipated fighting well into 1919. Victory seemed fragile and the state of the world in 1919, with the break up of empires, revolution, unrest and widespread ...”

“... and reworked by middle-class men with sexual anxieties of their own. ‘A Night in a Workhouse’, John Addington Symonds recalled, ‘brought the emotional tumour which was gathering within me to maturity,’ inspiring him to write a long passionate poem about cross-class love between men, including a section entitled ‘Kay’. Were the sexual ...”

“... on any aspirations.’ Ayers shared the platform with the English writer and discharged convict John Barker, formerly of the Angry Brigade: ‘I see my particular past either slagged off or romanticised, both of which I find distasteful.’ Spiotta’s novel does, in some ways, present the suffering of the 1960s as a package; it also romanticises its ...”

“... in the 1490s. Mortimer makes one new point: he suggests that Kent got his information from Sir John Pecche, who was in a position to know since he was, according to Mortimer, castellan of Corfe, where Edward II was in confinement. If Pecche was indeed at Corfe between 1327 and 1329, he was certainly well placed to spread stories of Edward’s ...”

“... I have a goodly heritage.’ Unexpectedly, however, William Jennings Bryan, who prosecuted John Thomas Scopes for promoting evolutionary theory in the 1920s, turns out to have been less of a villain than he is usually painted. Scopes may have famously defended evolution, but he was also a keen advocate of eugenics, a creed which the anti-Darwinist ...”

“... experiences than ever before. ‘Since Christmas,’ Accidia wrote in 1955, ‘we calculate that John has spoken to over four hundred people – I to about four, and those would be the dustman, fishman, policeman and the woman from one of the Harewood Estate lodges.’ The life of the postwar married woman, diminished and degraded as it was, was whipped up ...”