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“... John Major has now been prime minister for four years. For us, as presumably for him, it often seems a lifetime, so crowded has his premiership been with crises of one sort or another. Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldon not unreasonably, therefore, think this the moment to assess his prime ministerial career; the result is The Major Effect, a collection of 26 essays by a distinguished group of commentators – including the editors ...”

“... called Not Playing for Celtic: Another Paradise Lost, and, yes, the paradise in question is indeed John Milton’s – or Big John’s (as he is called here):    Beating Airdrie in this year’s final has hardly sent warning shock-waves reverberating around the football giants of Europe, but having witnessed the ...”

“... study, Unlikely Warriors: The British in the Spanish Civil War and the Struggle against Fascism. John Bassett, who served in the International Brigades for nine months, from March 1938 until they were disbanded that December, articulates the last-great-cause attitude better than anyone: ‘Never again will men of every creed and tongue go to war with the ...”

“... insight. One only has to compare his setting of Keats’s sonnet ‘To Sleep’ with, say, John Tavener’s setting of Blake’s ‘The Lamb’, to appreciate this. Tavener’s setting is original, attractively naive, touching, but it leaves one with the feeling that it is just one of many ways in which music could be fitted to these particular ...”

“... A 1984 publication from Lawrence and Wishart, 1939: The Communist Party and the War, edited by John Attfield and Stephen Williams, complements and illuminates the new volume. This is the transcript of a conference held in 1979, in which several Communists of the 1939 generation explained what they thought was going on in their minds at the time. Few ...”

“... the Thatchers. When he suddenly decided, at the end of his astonishing 1985 season, to march from John O’Groats to Land’s End to raise money for leukaemia research, there was, as Frank Keating persuasively proves, not an ounce of self-publicism in it. He knew his stunt could raise money, so he performed it – at great physical cost. Everyone quoted in ...”

“... the end came she was desperately sorry to be leaving him. Of the younger men coming to the fore, John Gollan, Pollitt’s successor – though the latter continued to dominate, she believes – was a likeable character; and George Matthews (still active today) seemed, as he did to everyone, a man full of ‘earnest ...”

“... rubbish but a well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had broken at long last and this was the ...”

“... benign among proprietors, has come and gone, picking up a peerage in the process. So has Victor Matthews, moving from building-site to Fleet Street and out again in less than ten years. The free or cut-price offers of dictionaries and flower-pots in the 1930s have given way to bingo and cash prizes. As for content, most of the popular papers are as cheap ...”

“... are likely to stir tabloid echoes in the reader’s mind, and before too long the name of Shannon Matthews will pop up – but Hensher is too wily to follow that case very closely, and enjoys laying a trail that combines real clues and pieces of misdirection. The trick of incorporating genre features into a literary novel, to judge by such successes as The ...”

“... of the nation address, he was grabbed by the scruff of his jacket by SABC’s head of news, Jimi Matthews, told not to get Matthews ‘into shit’ and ordered to put together soundbites of opposition politicians’ positive reactions to Zuma’s speech. He refused (even had he wished to, he could hardly have complied as ...”

“... a group of Parisian nominalists of whom the most radical was Jacques Almain, the most significant John Mair (1467-1550) – a Scot who taught Knox and Buchanan long before the Protestant Reformation. John Pocock is so dazzling in ‘Authority and Property: the Question of Liberal Origins’ that one has to rub one’s eyes ...”

“... of war in different ways during the 1940s (the Sinfonia da Requiem, the Holy Sonnets of John Donne),♪ while Walton churned out music for coercive films like Henry V and The First of the Few. In his Violin Concerto, Britten inaugurated an always changing, unpredictable, lifelong obsession with the form known as the passacaglia, in which variations ...”

“... and unexpected delights’. Another of the residents at the Stanley Crescent Hotel was Mary Matthews, a secretary at the Daily Express, whom Ballard had met and fallen in love with shortly before joining the RAF. ‘In due course Mary became pregnant,’ and they got married in September 1955. Not long afterwards, Ballard’s first stories were ...”

“... 1950s, Harry Pollitt could still veto the appointment of the middle-class former student George Matthews as his successor and insist on the worker John Gollan. Some twenty years later the industrial organisers of the Party were a Canadian lawyer and the son of an academic, and no adequately qualified worker could be found ...”