“... life, he said, we need something or someone to give us a purpose. Yet that sober old empiricist, John Stuart Mill, once said that simply on the basis of experience, no one would ever arrive at the existence of one god – and, it seems to me, certainly not a god of goodness – but at polytheism. Indeed anyone living in the ‘world’ (in the Christian ...”

“... the lights finally asked her to leave. A letter in the New York Times on 23 December, from a Mr John E. Colbert in Chicago, defended the White House’s recent compromises: President Obama is a realist who gets things done: he makes his case, counts votes, makes his best deal and the country moves forward. That’s progress. He doesn’t gloat or count ...”

“... as a phenomenon in itself but as an aspect of their relationships with each other, or his own with John Gower, who wrote in all three of England’s languages. Chaucer’s historical context, especially Richard II’s fraught relationships with the city of London, has been much explored in recent years; Butterfield promotes instead the more general context of ...”

“... Archimedes’ death is the one fixed point in his biography: the 12th-century Byzantine scholar John Tzetzes gives a birth date of 287 BC. That may be correct, and it may also be correct that his father was an astronomer. But everything else is uncertain. We can, however, say something about the world he lived in. Syracuse and Tarentum were among the ...”

“... Henry Bolckow, a Mecklenburg-born corn tycoon and his English iron-maker business partner, John Vaughan, who opened ironworks on the Tees in 1841. But the firm of Bolckow and Vaughan didn’t come into its own until 1850, when Bolckow rather opportunely found iron ore in the nearby Eston Hills while out hunting. The proximity of coal, transport and an ...”

“... men than me have meant less.’ So it’s possible to see how commissioning a Marlowe novel from John Banville, whose agent represents the Chandler estate too, might have struck all the parties involved as an inspired piece of stunt casting. A disciple of Proust, Nabokov and Beckett, an admirer of German Romanticism and 17th-century painting, a reimaginer of ...”

“... As with every great comic who has parlayed an adolescent act into professional celebrity – see John Belushi – there’s despair lurking behind the humour. Shteyngart carried his class clown routine into his novels, passed it on to Girshkin and Vainberg and Abramov, but something else was going on in those books: there’s Girshkin’s aggrieved ...”

“... Guccione in 1983, that she found her voice, and perhaps, her ease with burning bridges. Sir John Junor, who had been editing the Sunday Express for thirty years when I joined, maintained that you could not be sued for libel if you framed something as a question … Thus I could ask my old boss … if he was connected with the Mafia, and put the question ...”

“... The dramatic west front, with its towering oriels, is an abstracted Tudor composition which, as John Summerson pointed out, may owe something to the central reference library in Bristol designed by a distinguished but less applauded English near contemporary, Charles Holden. But there was no precedent for the extraordinary library space behind those tall ...”

“... scenes occur in the great mining films of the early 1940s (Carol Reed’s The Stars Look Down, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley). Bernard soon leaves the mineshafts behind. His main interest lies in the ways in which the advent of the elevator transformed the design, construction and experience of high-rise buildings, and thus of modern urban life in ...”

“... its gloomy and well-guarded interior. To get in at all required a panoply of special passes. When John Steinbeck and a colleague visited in 1947, they had to run a gauntlet of guards on the causeway leading up to it, where their passes were scrutinised, then bells rang and they proceeded further under military escort: ‘Just two hours in this royal palace so ...”

“... defended the letters’ authenticity; a few assigned them to various forgers; but others, notably John Benton and D.W. Robertson, held their sole author to be Abelard, who they said had channelled or even invented the passionate, unrepentant Heloise to point up his success in converting her. As the later epistles demonstrate, she was indeed converted, or at ...”

“... business than it was when Tartt was starting out: I’d back her in a race to become the next John Irving but wouldn’t feel so confident if Theo had to square off against the likes of Katniss ...”

“... philosophers to be able to say something intelligible about it’, is itself not unmetaphorical. John Locke associated it with a rhetorical idea of the plain style, which metaphorically was akin to the kinds of clothes you wear on weekdays rather than on high days or holidays: ‘Philosophy itself,’ he declared, ‘must have so much Complacency, as to be ...”

“... about the screen-mediation of reality. In his philosophic commonplace book Straw Dogs (2002), John Gray propounded a new theory of consciousness: ‘In evolutionary prehistory consciousness emerged as a side-effect of language. Today it is a by-product of the media.’ Cronenberg is one of a burgeoning group of artists who are attempting to describe what ...”