“... Americans, is close to hero-worship, treats FDR’s endless deceptions and tricks with indulgence. John Steinbeck, whom FDR once persuaded to do some spying for him in Mexico, came to the conclusion that he liked mystery, subterfuge and indirect tactics for their own sake. But maybe, like many privileged people, he didn’t see why the world shouldn’t be ...”

“... diagnosis (courtesy of a doctor modelled on the currently fanatically discredited John Money, who believed and perhaps believes that gender is socially established in a child’s first two years, and advocated surgery for a normal life); a spell in the wilderness (a San Francisco emporium of the exotic) to come to terms with who he/she is; and ...”

“... describes William Barrett, a doctor active in the Society for Psychical Research, assisting John Tyndall, a leading scientific naturalist, when Tyndall was demonstrating the effects of sound on light at the Royal Institution in the 1860s. Shaking a bunch of keys, or chirruping, or clapping loudly from a distance, Tyndall showed that he could quell the ...”

“... the solvency of a bank; the risk systems see to this. The danger posed by a Nick Leeson or a John Rusnak (the Baltimore trader currently under investigation) is somewhat different: that of traders deliberately concealing or falsifying deals they have done, so preventing the bank from even registering the risks or the losses being incurred. Deal-checking ...”

“... the period. He reads, for instance, the story of Pocahontas, the daughter of Powhatan who married John Rolfe and moved to London, not as a story of an Indian who sought to become an Englishwoman but as a complicated narrative of negotiation. He portrays Kateri Tekakwitha – the so-called Lily of the Mohawks, now a candidate for canonisation by the Catholic ...”

“... in some of these views (and certainly the more formal diary of Pepys’s friend and contemporary John Evelyn is consciously scientific in its interests), but it is painfully reductive to see Pepys’s diary as a piece of double-entry book-keeping of the soul, or as a spiritual equivalent to the microscope Robert Hooke was using in the 1660s to count the ...”

“... he discusses ‘the (sad) necessity of iconoclasm in a revolutionary situation with my friend John Barrell’. They wonder what they would do ‘if we ever found ourselves part of a mob storming through the portico’. Now, decades later, he ‘finds himself’ in the Getty Museum – in the very institution that radical art historians in California’s ...”

“... also a question of how buoyant one can be in the face of such things. In an early interview with John Haffenden, Muldoon was asked: ‘Why do you think the notion of alternative lives is peculiarly fetching, philosophically attractive, to your imagination?’ He replied: ‘I think it’s central. One of the ways in which we are most ourselves is that we ...”

“... speak for the Australian electorate? The impasse proved too much for the governor-general, Sir John Kerr. Although his authority was constitutionally questionable, Kerr broke the stalemate by ousting Whitlam, dissolving both houses of parliament, and calling a new election. The shock waves from this (ab)use of the royal prerogative continue to reverberate ...”

“... of white crosses and an Indo-Muslim dome sit alongside a rice paddy. His distant predecessor St John Philby (father of Kim), who acted as political officer in Amara ninety years ago, still enjoys a local reputation. Another sheikh fondly remembers one ‘Mr Grimley’, who helped build a vital canal in the 1940s. ‘There are very high expectations here ...”

“... scene in North and South shows Margaret Hale flinging herself between the body of the master, John Thornton, and his striking workers, in an effort to defuse the threatening violence of the encounter. ‘What possessed me to defend that man as if he were a helpless child!’ she wonders later. The plot’s answer is that she will eventually come to love ...”

“... something else is going on. James is discussing what he calls the ‘marvellous outpourings’ of John Addington Symonds – two years later, thinking of Symonds in connection with the trial of Oscar Wilde, James calls them ‘fond outpourings’ – which constitute a privately printed pamphlet on love between men. ‘The exhibition is infinitely ...”

“... after the ‘black bottle’ incident when he accused a respected ‘Indian’ officer, Captain John Reynolds, of ordering a bottle of porter at the mess table of the 11th, where only champagne was allowed. Reynolds protested that he had in fact ordered Moselle, which came in a similar black bottle. Cardigan refused to accept this as an excuse, since ...”

“... scholarship, has the better of this debate. It has been convincingly shown that the martyrologist John Foxe’s admiring account was based on good evidence. In less than a fortnight of the spring of 1536, and almost in two days, the world of Anne Boleyn fell apart. The queen was charged and found guilty of multiple adultery, and all too soon she, together ...”

“... that painters would have anything left to say about the observable world. It was only while in John Grierson’s employment – collaborating with Auden, Humphrey Jennings and Britten – that Coldstream rediscovered a private, ‘regressive’ zest for painting, working out of hours on ‘a craze for doing heads and faces’. Whatever rationale could be ...”