“... I don’t want to pretend that Machiavelli was actually a classic liberal, a precursor of John Locke, celebrating individual rights, the public/private distinction and the rule of law. The sanguine suggestion that a new ruler might make himself secure in regard to the political class by ‘doing away with them’ is enough to dispel any thought of ...”

“... thirties. He wasn’t experimental, at least not in the beguiling fashion of the far better known John Ashbery, who combines the exaltation of Wallace Stevens with the shrugging insouciance of Frank O’Hara in order to come up with poems as expressive and as inscrutable as Reverdy’s. If Merrill was experimental, then it was in the way Bach played with ...”

“... husband’s poems. In such cases writing does in a sense become a ‘genuinely social activity’. John Clare’s dealings with his publisher Taylor provide a variation on this theme. Clare’s peculiar circumstances resulted in revisions that were necessarily ‘social’, but modern editors have a persistent tendency to revert to the earliest unsocial ...”

“... She didn’t call again. After leaving the family she got a job in Waitrose, in the basement of John Barnes in Finchley Road. She worked there for 31 years on the check-out, and they were, Pearl says, unhappiness notwithstanding, ‘the best years of my life’. This is how I met her. She had the longest queues, but still people lined up to have their goods ...”

“... That is entirely a matter for you. We have been forced to listen to the whinings of Mr Norman St John Scott, a scrounger, a parasite, a pervert, a worm, a self-confessed player of the pink oboe, a man who by his own confession chews pillows … You may now retire, as indeed should I, carefully to consider your verdict of Not Guilty. When, eight years ...”

“... seems marvellous, when all the countries surrounding Africa are so forward in comparison,’ John Speke, discoverer of the source of the White Nile, observed. Very much a man of his time, Speke was necessarily less aware than we are today of the diversity of African societies, their extraordinary artistic wealth, and the antiquity of their trade with the ...”

“... philosophy. As a youth, Melbourne spent two winters in Glasgow, living plainly and studying with John Millar, disciple of David Hume and Adam Smith, and one of the most influential proselytisers for the Scottish Enlightenment. This experience gave him a strong commitment to the principles of political economy; it also profoundly influenced his thinking on ...”

“... satisfyingly inevitable one. In a recent reply to Clementi, the Hong Kong poet Leung Ping Kwan (in John Minford’s translation) resists the urge to gloat and tempers anger with ruefulness: That rhapsodic rhetoric of yours   takes the measure of us,   trusses us tight in a wire cage of tradition,   condescends,   strews a little casual scholar’s ink ...”

“... in order to please his father: Rachmaninov’s Third. When one-armed piano teacher Cecil Parkes (John Gielgud) tells Helfgott that no one’s ever been ‘mad enough’ to attempt it in the Royal College of Music’s annual competition, the student replies: ‘Am I mad enough, Professor? Am I?’ Apparently so, because he has a nervous breakdown as soon as ...”

“... with the gloss of apparent spontaneity. Working on this material with them was their producer, John Ammonds, the man who persuaded Morecambe to trust the camera, to play to it with his asides and use it as a mirror for his idiot grin. The other member of the team, their new writer Eddie Braben, was only rarely present. While Hills and Green had entered ...”

“... a gaggle of ducks into the heated swimming-pool. In 1969 he and Celia holidayed in Marbella with John Aspinall’s half-sister, Jennifer ... In London he spent every night in clubs like the Aretusa, the Speakeasy, Tramps and Yours or Mine ... He holidayed in Marrakech with Paul Getty’s wife, Tahlita, Christopher Gibb (close friend and mentor of Mick Jagger ...”

“... American intervention was crucial, not because of anything the Americans did (as Malcolm Brown and John Keegan show, the Canadians and Australians had a for more significant role in the key Allied offensive), but because the knowledge that these legions of fresh and confident men were pouring into France put paid to German morale. Even so, as Ferguson points ...”

“... journeys of the Irish abbot Saint Brendan; the later expeditions of Martin Frobisher, John Davis, Henry Hudson (who became a bay), William Baffin (who became an island) and Vitus Bering (who became a strait). He describes Robert Peary claiming the North Pole for America, and how, to keep up the morale of his men, Richard Collinson erected a ...”

“... difficulty of keeping one’s hat in place while performing the nine prostrations of the kowtow. John Bell, a Scottish doctor attached to a Russian embassy c.1720, didn’t enjoy the way sheep were cooked, but was fascinated by the acrobats and jugglers. He reckoned that Russia was the only nation with a fair chance of conquering China, though there ...”

“... Saxon, are momentarily collapsed, in what Heaney, borrowing a phrase from his poetic compatriot John Montague, describes as an escape from the ‘partitioned intellect’ into some larger-spirited, unsectarian country of the mind.It seems a pity to sour this eirenic liberal pluralism. But the ‘partitioned intellect’ in Ireland is not in fact one which ...”