“... of classical music more generally. The first organist at St Paul’s to receive a knighthood was John Goss, though he had to wait until his retirement in 1872. After that new organists often got one immediately. The pattern at the abbey was very similar: James Turle was the last of the old type, having been organist there for 51 years, starting in ...”

“... colonial conquest that 18th-century pessimists, such as Rousseau or the Russophile English cleric John Brown, believed to be driving the continent towards a future of unrelenting chaos and despotism. In his 1795 essay ‘Towards Perpetual Peace’, Kant wrote that to break this cycle of violence and oppression might require a single ‘powerful and ...”

“... English use of the word ‘model’ occurred in a translation of Euclid by the mathematician John Dee in 1570, and through the 17th century the word could be used to mean, variously, a plan or design, an ‘ideal example’ and ‘a unit of scale’. So in this last sense an architectural feature which conformed to the golden ratio of 1.62:1 might be ...”

“... an uproarious visit to Edinburgh and Glasgow by ‘sixteen French socialist workmen’, the orator John Bruce Glasier proclaimed: ‘We are hastening to reach the City of the Commune before night falls.’But as Forster points out, solidarity with Commune veterans on the part of British working-class movements was usually more symbolic than active. Plenty of ...”

“... at one point in London Match. This is certainly true from a narrative or dramatic perspective, and John le Carré also made use of the idea. But in le Carré, the mole will turn out to be the agent having an affair with the hero’s wife, while in Deighton, the hero’s wife will herself turn out to be the mole. This isn’t really a spoiler, or no more of a ...”

“... Canada.Seward also negotiated a treaty with Denmark to acquire the islands of St Thomas and St John, two of its possessions in the Caribbean. A State Department report of 1868, produced for Seward by the former Mississippi senator and ardent expansionist Robert J. Walker, suggested ‘the propriety of obtaining from the same power Greenland, and probably ...”

“... attempted election grab of 2020-21 has been described as ‘a coup in search of a legal theory’: John Eastman, the director of the Claremont Centre for Constitutional Jurisprudence, provided the theory in a legal memo that exaggerated the constitutional role of the then vice president, Mike Pence, in the congressional counting of Electoral College ...”

“... Barker Centre with its statue of Winged Time. I had taken the same picture under the bust of John Harvard as I had on my last visit. I had seen William James’s house, had imagined Elif Batuman scampering around campus, gathering material for The Idiot. I had refused, out of pure perversion, to see the Glass Flowers, had gone to visit the Chinese jades ...”

“... and then, without bothering to consult the operational War Diaries, proceeds to spin out the John Connell-Correlli Barnett myth that Montgomery’s only contribution to the Desert arena was an incomprehensible uplift in morale. Monty’s plan for the defence of Alam Halfa, he declares, was inherited from Auchinleck: he neglects to mention that ...”

“... Rabbit novels come out at the turn of each decade, like a series of reports on the state of America. Rabbit is rich, the third and latest, takes place in Brewster, Pennsylvania, from June 1979 into 1980. Rabbit – as Harry Angstrom is still known to himself – runs a Toyota agency; his scene is now the country club, the golf course and the Bahamas on a wife-swapping holiday ...”

“... downwards.’ The profound patriotism of Shelley and Byron, the inability to think logically of John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman and Lewis Carroll? No, it won’t do, and Orwell, for once, was talking through his hat – perhaps relaxing in what he considered an ‘English’ manner. It really seems, then, not quite proper that distinguished experts ...”

“... sin beyond belief’, but wants them greened out of existence (almost literally – like John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Cohn’s island’s vegetation has vivid accesses of post-nuclear lushness). The old Thunderer has turned ecologist and technocrat, and his vendetta against man retains some of that insouciance which impels some deities old and new to ...”

“... that might only be because his epigones have been talking in funny voices ever since. Later on, John Cleese made an almost comparable impact, in the sense that he, too, had clearly got his originality fully worked out in advance. But for everyone else, humour was a craft to be learned, even if the talent was unmistakable. Indeed it can be said that the ...”

“... well as exceptional. O’Connor was still hankering for a partnership of classes in 1848, but as John Belchem says, writing (in somewhat eccentric English) of the fateful year, middle-class opinion was firmly behind the government and its repressive tactics. We may credit revolutionary happenings abroad with a decisive influence: by inspiring Chartists with ...”

“... thinks the same way. These may be provincial views but they are not necessarily mistaken. Pope John Paul evidently does not think they are. His journey to Central America was that of an enraged (and conceivably ill-advised) chief constable come to impose order on an unruly populace and on his own badly-disciplined rank and file. The plaza where the Pope ...”