“... more mocking posture, in another century and in another country, assumed by the American president John Adams: “It will never be pretended that any person employed . . . had interviews with the gods, or was in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven.”’ Wittreich spends the rest of the paragraph glossing Adams, and then moves on. Notice how his ...”

“... Her topic makes most sense when the details of diplomacy are placed in a wider context.In 1836, John Stuart Mill claimed in an essay that Lord Melbourne’s government had become ‘smitten with the epidemic disease of Russophobia’, an irrational panic that had triggered an unnecessary increase in defence spending. ‘Russophobia’ has never quite left ...”

“... San was chiefly the work of the Dutch, and some British historians have accepted this view, but John Philip, a hawk-eyed missionary in the 1820s, knew that this wasn’t so. The system ‘which rendered the Dutch name so infamous’, he wrote, is now being carried on ‘in all its horrors’ under the British Government: ‘Impatient to obtain undisturbed ...”

“... in October 1529, More, though a layman, was soon the Church’s most eager agent. With the help of John Stokesley, the Bishop of London, he broke into the houses of suspected heretics, arresting them on the spot and sometimes interrogating them in his own home. He imprisoned one man in the porter’s lodge of his house, and had him put in the stocks. He raided ...”

“... of a lifetime to hear what is unquestionably the world’s greatest brass section,’ Constant Lambert wrote in the Sunday Referee. ‘His music has a truly Shakespearean universality,’ another London critic declared. In 1934, Lambert wrote of Ellington’s 1928 ‘Hot and Bothered’: ‘I know of nothing in Ravel so ...”

“... of the expedition’s other climbers were British, as was its finance, and its leader, Colonel John Hunt (now Baron Hunt of Lanfair Waterdine and a Knight of the Garter) was on secondment from the British Army. On descending, Ed Hillary, as he is universally known, shouted to his fellow New Zealander George Lowe, another climber of great ...”

“... tell you how awful it was. This period has now gone down in history as the great renaissance, with John Osborne, the Royal Court, but most of the time, night after night, you would go and see wretched actors, and there would always be something in the play like ‘God, is this never going to end?’ and Gallery Nell would seize her chance. One of the most ...”

“... a lot of people nervous. Oxford contacts who went on to higher things. Old mates, such as Rick Lambert (future editor of the Financial Times) and Chris Patten (dog-fancier and last governor of Hong Kong). They needn’t have worried. Marks’s memories are doctored like Hansard. He reveals nothing that can’t be verified in some official report. ‘Thanks ...”

“... Historians have continued to strain after the nature of their collective significance. Angela Lambert tried hard in 1984: ‘Many others who enjoyed the same privileges remained boring and boorish … It is not easy to be unfailingly charming, lively and original.’ Unfortunately, she did little to alleviate the suspicion that the Souls merely provide ...”

“... were nothing special to begin with. But it turned out that the show’s young producer, Verity Lambert, had ignored her boss’s instructions about BEMs, and commissioned a seven-part serial from Terry Nation, called ‘The Daleks’. From the moment one appeared, sucker first, the show took off. The designer, Raymond Cusick, might have been briefed to ...”

“... heavy conducting load with Adrian Boult and Basil Cameron. Boult and Cameron (along with Constant Lambert) conducted the Proms in the 1945 season, including the final concert, but this was an occasion which neither enjoyed, as they were ‘pelted with flowers’ by the audience. Nor were they alone in regretting the increasingly boisterous behaviour of the ...”

“... of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the enclosure of Marske Moor in Swaledale to create a new farm, Cordilleras. The farm and most of the fields round about were named after places in South America, Valparaiso, Cotopaxi, Sierra Pedragosa and so ...”

“... John Reed,​ witness to the October Revolution and author of Ten Days that Shook the World, seems to have turned against the Bolshevik leaders just before he died in Moscow in 1920. His apostasy was not publicly known, however, and a decade later the American Communist Party, eager to exploit his fame, encouraged the formation of John Reed Clubs in New York and other cities ‘to bring closer all creative workers ...”

“... self’ was, really, his great subject. In the creation of Isabel Archer, say, or in the making of Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors, James allowed his interests in material and moral matters to wane, and, without losing sight of them, he replaced them with a soaring vision of what the human spirit could become, under certain pressures and in a certain ...”

“... store. On midsummer’s night in 1955 a tall, broad-shouldered farmer 17 years her senior, John Warren, took her to the stock car racing, and a year later, when Wendy was 21, they got married. John Warren rented 175 acres from the local squire in Dunton Bassett, a village in the south-west of the county. He’d been ...”