“... society which was monochrome, buttoned-up and circumscribed, but fundamentally benign and (to use John Major’s celebrated phrase) ‘at ease with itself’. That ease was, of course, predicated on the exclusion and silencing of certain social groups: there are almost no people of colour in Ealing films – or in many British films of the 1950s, for that ...”

“... it a ‘non-imperial empire’ (channelling the doyen of liberal international relations, G. John Ikenberry, who has used a similar phrase about the US). Roberts tends to see the EU more as a single highly decentralised state than a confederation. He justifies this on the basis that the ‘European regime as a whole’ exercises state-like control over ...”

“... Norris’s embassy to the court of Jahangir’s grandson, Aurangzeb, in 1699. On the London stage, John Dryden had presented audiences with flattering parallels between Aurangzeb and James’s grandson, Charles II, in Aureng-Zebe: A Tragedy (1675). On the diplomatic stage, however, Norris’s mission was a failure. Sent to secure trading concessions for the ...”

“... It’s also haunted by other works, including Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, John Cheever’s Bullet Park and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road as well as novels by Generation X authors: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm. But the closest point of comparison is the film American Beauty. Both portray a ...”

“... Tudor writers​ made being a court fool sound like a holiday. In John Heywood’s play Witty and Witless (c.1520s), ordinary working men are said to live with great ‘payne of body’: they strain their muscles ‘plowyng’, ‘cartyng’, ‘hedgyng and dychyng’, exposed all year round to the weather. ‘Some yn wynter fryse, some yn somer fry ...”

“... did not assume a new guise in the shadow of the Holocaust. In 1866, a British surgeon called John Erichsen described how patients who had been in railway accidents, and seemed at the time to have sustained no injuries, later – sometimes much later – developed severe psychic and somatic symptoms: they became confused, lost the ability to conduct their ...”

“... and looking just like paint thinner or gasoline.And then there’s the aerial footage taken by John Wathen, or Hurricane Creekkeeper, that’s gone viral on YouTube, Facebook, other facets of the internet, and the media, including CNN. It shows great plumes of smoke rising from the sea, as the oil is burned off the surface. The flames are invisible but the ...”

“... the dreams that attached themselves to him. In choosing ‘a well-rounded life’ as his subtitle, John Campbell risks some obvious jibes about his increasingly portly subject, but he delivers on its promise. It is a persuasive, if at times indulgent, portrait of a life rich in satisfactions. At its heart were a long, close marriage and three children, to ...”

“... a visionary monologue notionally addressed to a love-object, though her reality is pretty foggy. John Stuart Mill read the poem attentively in preparation for a review which never appeared, although Browning did later get to see his notes and was understandably struck by one of Mill’s sharper comments: ‘The writer seems to me possessed with a more ...”

“... of a number of recent books by Andreas Malm, opens by quoting an observation made in the LRB by John Lanchester (22 March 2007) that terrorism had thus far been markedly absent from the climate movement.* That might have been a sign of the times. There was little appetite in the years after 2001 for discussion of the merits of terrorism. Even if the ...”

“... stick.But​ Penney was answerable to the American in charge of the Anzio operation, Major General John Lucas, who answered to the American Lieutenant General Mark Clark (whose troops nicknamed him Marcus Aurelius Clarkus for the Roman imperial hauteur of his manner), who answered to the British General Sir Harold Alexander, who answered to Winston ...”

“... the aristocratic Calthorpe Estate, which was still tending it carefully as late as the 1960s, when John Madin was commissioned to design by far the best modernist housing in the city for the area. Other social improvement plans have grown out of it: Edgbaston adjoins Aston Webb’s overripe Victorian university buildings, and is close to the rangier, folksier ...”

“... a problem. Many of the ‘first families of Virginia’ prided themselves on being descendants of John Rolfe, an early settler at Jamestown, and his wife, the Indian ‘princess’ Pocahontas. The new ‘one-drop rule’ meant that they might find themselves prohibited from marrying a white person – or even classed as ‘coloured’ themselves. After much ...”

“... The American author of the words, Anna Walker, is invoking the declaration of Christ himself (John 9:4): ‘I must work the works of Him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.’ Good works in this general sense could be performed by an invalid Evangelical lady, flat on her back but radiating piety. There has, however, been ...”

“... of the Bolshevik Autocracy (1952). As a publisher’s reader, he tried to prevent acceptance of John Erickson’s Soviet High Command. In the days of Times Literary Supplement anonymity Carr saw to it that he himself, Isaac Deutscher and, where needed, the wife of the Moscow journalist, Victor Louis, were employed as reviewers. He and Deutscher would ...”