“... local authorities chronically unresponsive to the changing patterns of local politics and need. John Stewart, Professor at Birmingham University’s largely ‘self-financing’ Institute of Local Government Studies, may draw rather too neat a picture of ‘the new management of local government’ but his book of this name leaves no doubt that ...”

“... an ‘example of unfair burden sharing’ and ‘using a hatchet when you need a scalpel’ when John McCain proposed it during the campaign of 2008. In the same speech, Obama embraced the false analogy between federal budgets and household budgets, overlooking (for starters) the government’s control of taxation and the money supply. ‘Families across the ...”

“... library of Alexandria or the arrival of the man from Porlock. In an essay on At Swim-Two-Birds, John Cronin quotes a crucial passage in Henry James’s ‘The Art of Fiction’ in an effort to find a context for the offences the book commits against both art and, indeed, fiction. James wrote: Certain accomplished novelists have a habit of giving themselves ...”

“... there with grander landscape sweeps in Canada, Alaska, California. He spoke of his love of John Clare, of ‘The Badger’ being one of his marker poems. Driving down to work at UC Davis, Snyder had noticed another kind of urban edgeland. ‘There is a big rice field, flooded paddy, near Sacramento airport. It used to have a sign on it: “This rice ...”

“... military establishment and the new government in Washington, a town presided over by another John/Jack the lad. Profumo’s go-getting reputation and unstuffy demeanour made him attractive to the men around JFK, who liked that he didn’t seem like a typical Brit, never mind a typical Tory. He was extremely sociable, and well suited to the work ...”

“... You’d think we would know by now. But we don’t know. In a recent essay in the LRB (3 January), John Lanchester said the simplest summary of the state of knowledge in macroeconomics is ‘nobody knows anything.’ The same is true of macro-politics. In micro-politics, as in microeconomics, we are drowning in knowledge. The minutiae of the inner workings of ...”

“... friend of Patrick’s, he talked mostly to him, but Princess Margaret didn’t confine herself to John Gielgud and Paul Eddington but to her credit wanted to meet the boys in the play, which she did, though I suspect most of them had no idea who she was. In 1984 Snowdon took pictures of me for (I think) the Sunday Times after the shooting of A Private ...”

“... Klein and Pettis hark back to the classic study of imperialism published by the British economist John Hobson in 1902, in the wake of the Boer War. Hobson’s work inspired Lenin’s understanding of the First World War as an outgrowth of imperialist competition but, unlike Lenin, Hobson refused to accept that financial rivalry must inevitably lead to ...”

“... would be seen through its ogival windows. What bells had not been evacuated from St Catherine, St John, St Brigit, Saints Barbara, Elizabeth, Peter and Paul, from Trinity to Corpus Christi, melted in their belfries and dripped away without pomp or ceremony. In the Big Mill red wheat was milled. Butcher Street smelled of burnt Sunday roast. The Municipal ...”

“... who died in 2017, was one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past century, perhaps even since John Stuart Mill. Edmonds rightly believes that if Parfit’s ideas about personal identity, rationality and equality were absorbed into our moral and political thinking, they would radically alter our beliefs about punishment, the distribution of social ...”

“... fine Gentlemen’. Yet this evidence exists only because the princess – under her male name, John Cooper – unwisely took a man to court for stealing her male clothes. It would be a wishful misreading to call this a trans prehistory, but nor is it obviously and simply gay. It is evidence of a much more fluid relationship between sexual orientation and ...”

“... Sister Line, My Brother Lanoé’). She finished her first two plays, Un rat qui passe and John et Joe, in 1972. John et Joe, about two middle-aged idlers and the lottery ticket passed between them, was performed first, in 1975, at a dinner theatre in Neuchâtel. In many ways it’s an outlier: the dialogue shares ...”

“... of the Negro and the sufferings of other people’ that stirred within him when he at tended a John Reed Club in Chicago in the Twenties; and Stephen Spender speaking about being ‘moved by the unemployed’ in Germany in the early Thirties. It would seem, in other words, that it was hopeful sentiment that seduced them into Communism, not rational ...”

“... for the next attempt to regenerate national pride. The early omens weren’t good. Weight picks up John O’Farrell’s story about her election as Conservative Party leader in 1976, when she appeared in front of the cameras and gave a ‘V’ for victory sign the wrong way round. ‘She was smiling and telling the British people to fuck off at the same ...”

“... with which he wound up his adolescence recalls something of Kepler’s horoscope of himself: Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, a tall, angular, dangly, ugly, fair-haired fellow of 18½, quick on the uptake, with a considerable if superficial stock of general knowledge and a lot of original ideas, general and theoretical. An incorrigible striker of attitudes, which ...”