“... emails, is strikingly similar to the message dropped through the letterboxes of Pepys Road in John Lanchester’s novel Capital – ‘We Want What You Have’.) Lasdun’s parents were Jews who converted to the C of E, and Nasreen’s communications quickly became virulently anti-semitic: ‘Do you have to be the stereotype of a Jew, James?’; ‘I ...”

“... what he’s set in motion. ‘As a fiction writer,’ he said in a 1978 debate with the novelist John Gardner, ‘you hope that the amount of meaning that you can pack into the book will always be more than you are capable of consciously understanding. Otherwise, the book is likely to be as thin as you are. You have to trick your medium into doing far better ...”

“... them into his mouth … and washing each mouthful down with prodigious gulps of liquor.’ In true John Belushi fashion, Guthrie proceeded to steal the hostess’s onyx and gold cigarette-holder and attempted to make off with the money that had been collected, pouring the coins inside his shirt. ‘Somebody shoot at me,’ he said. ‘You cain’t hit me ...”

“... First was the discovery of a genuinely effective drug for controlling mania. The Australian John Cade found that lithium really helped, and after a lot of scepticism (and many unwitting overdoses) the Federal Drug Administration approved its use in 1970; in 1974 it was approved for the treatment of manic depression. Before that, there was really no ...”

“... unrivalled size, sophistication and moral intensity. In 1991, a survey by the American historian John Langdon counted 25,000 relevant books and articles in English alone. The debate is still going strong today, for several reasons. First, the war unleashed the demons of political disorder, extremism and cruelty that disfigured the 20th century. It destroyed ...”

“... greyhound breeder, pioneering aviator, nationalist warmonger and proto-Fascist demagogue (‘the John the Baptist of Fascism’, as an early, Mussolini-sponsored biography styled him), he was certainly an all-rounder, and perhaps one shouldn’t complain if mild-mannered wallflower is not also on the list. ‘You must make your own life, as you make a work ...”

“... its long depressive state – into something beautiful as opposed to correct or clever. John Cage, for some of us, is an even lesser god than Duchamp, but in the final room at Tate, where a suite of big abstracts done under Cage’s auspices is hung, it does not matter. The imperfect lusciousness of the canvases, each nearly ten feet square (the ...”

“... suffering from chronic anxiety because they can see no way out of their troubles.’ Her colleague John Stiles recently found he had no way to help a 28-year-old woman and her two children who were sleeping rough outside the railway station at Walmer, just down the coast. ‘She has mental health problems,’ Stiles said, ‘and her landlord had evicted her on ...”

“... Surrounded by poets – Giuseppe Ungaretti, Allen Ginsberg, Ingeborg Bachmann, Rafael Alberti, John Berryman, Charles Tomlinson, Stephen Spender – we felt en famille. Paz and I and our wives drove to Assisi to see Giotto’s frescos, wandered about the Chiostro dei Morti, and climbed to the Eremo delle Carceri, home to Saint Francis’s stone ...”

“... for instance, had impeccable credentials. Of good Quaker stock and the daughter of the Radical MP John Bright, she campaigned in her twenties for the Reform Bill and women’s enfranchisement; later she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union and was honorary treasurer of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. Affectionate and caring ...”

“... haze, and he finds himself wrapped in the climate of his childhood.’ The smell of Father John Forest being burned in May 1538 makes him recall the (fictional) episode, originally rehearsed in Wolf Hall, in which the ‘what – eight years old?’ (in Wolf Hall ‘nine or so’) Cromwell witnesses the burning of the Lollard Joan Boughton at ...”

“... half a million Londoners every day by 1910. It was not the biggest chain in Victorian England. John Pearce started off with a coffee stall on the corner of East Road and City Road and by the 1890s had 46 refreshment rooms, 14 with hotels attached. Pearce & Plenty mostly catered for poor workers with ‘large appetites but small means’ as the Caterer put ...”

“... I kept nothing but the works of Freud, Klein, Bion, Winnicott and Lacan, alongside Adam Phillips, John Forrester and some André Green and Laplanche. All the other history and commentary and penumbra went, along with books on psychical research, including the two fat volumes of Frederic Myers’s Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. A whole ...”

“... a book called Social Justice in the Liberal State, in which he invited us to consider a version of John Rawls’s ‘veil of ignorance’ where we all start out together in a spaceship circling an uninhabited planet whose resources we have to distribute among ourselves in open dialogue before any of us is allowed to descend to the surface. In the real ...”

“... humanist Roger Ascham could feel pleasingly fashionable when he claimed that his friends at St John’s College, Cambridge, had worked out that all poetry could be divided into the four very large categories of comedy, tragedy, epic and ‘melic’. Lyric became, in effect, the ‘everything else’ of poetic theory, stuff that was metrical and possibly ...”