“... opportunist whose idea of the long term is tomorrow’s Daily Mail headline, and who, unlike John Major in similar circumstances, is seemingly prepared to do almost anything to retain his leadership. In his attempts to contain Ukip he has already given a number of hostages to fortune. He has promised a referendum on EU membership – on Ukip’s ...”

“... weak police force, still had far more coercive power at its disposal than the England of John Lackland, and by the autumn of 1754 Mandrin’s exploits were making the government distinctly nervous. His gang looked less like a collection of brigands, and more like a small guerrilla army. Fears arose that in the event of a new foreign war against ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the world. In 1999, the year she first visited the war-ravaged country, the tropical ecologist John Terborgh declared that ‘nature’ in El Salvador had ‘been extinguished’. Hecht therefore expected a ‘blasted landscape’ but what she found was green everywhere, ribbons of urban hedgerows, slum ravines planted with trees, backyard ...”

“... taste for military bands and films about army life, like Tunes of Glory, with Alec Guinness and John Mills. An intense dislike of denim, which I associate with fatigues and servility, has deterred me from ever wearing jeans. I love to hear a Jamaican accent and, despite its violence and gang warfare, I still think of the island’s extraordinary ...”

“... Germany and at first didn’t hesitate to express his impatience with the scare: when asked by Sir John Barlow, MP for Frome, whether he was aware that there were 66,000 German soldiers in England and 50,000 stands of Mauser rifles stored in cellars within a few hundred yards of Charing Cross, he thanked Barlow for providing such an excellent example of the ...”

“... poetry, neither of which he knows anything about. He suffers anxiety attacks, pops pills, reads John Ashbery and sits in the park, where he fails to work. As in a video game, it’s not exactly what happens that counts: what’s important is how deeply you’re drawn into the world of the game, how transfixed you become. Adam is drawn deeply into his new ...”

“... in 1998 – iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad – Jobs had a few lost years. In 1983, he recruited John Sculley, president of Pepsi-Cola, as Apple’s CEO. ‘Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water,’ he asked Sculley, ‘or do you want a chance to change the world?’ Isaacson dismisses Sculley, claiming he perceived ‘in Jobs ...”

“... Marian frame – as an illustration of a popular story from the Apocrypha, which has the infant John the Baptist, in flight from Herod’s executioners, come across Christ on his flight into Egypt. Though never was Egypt like this. Maybe the trigger for the temple of boulders was a line from the Song of Songs: ‘My dove in the clefts of rocks (in ...”

“... in Oberkampf in the 1990s, and in his photography book and in his jazz book, and in the one about John Berger he did in 1986, as he was starting out. He writes, often, about romance and glamour and pleasure and excitement. Even more, he writes about listlessness and ambivalence and prevarication, the digressions and distractions that seem to stop him getting ...”

“... regaled.’ A life history in which the stomach is wholly absent – you would never know whether John Stuart Mill ever yearned for sweets or felt his tummy rumble – doesn’t seem quite human. It is only in the past decade or so, however (M.F.K. Fisher and Alice B. Toklas notwithstanding), that food has been making the transition from supporting role to ...”