“... what in the 1930s the American historian Herbert Bolton called ‘the epic of Greater America’. John Elliott’s long awaited book is just that. It not only fills an obvious gap – more like a chasm – but sets the pattern for a whole new historiography of the European colonial empires. As with all Elliott’s books, the architecture and the scope are ...”

“... geometrical forms and imposing, non-human physicality. The City of Making Do, associated with John Sloan, is the peopled New York of parks, neighbourhoods and sidewalks, a ‘warm, soft and slightly nostalgic’ alternative to the ‘cool, hard-edged and futuristic’ world of high-powered Manhattan. Art critics may not agree with Bender’s assessment of ...”

“... well-run European city in the dawn of the 21st century.’ Coetzee also uses Costello’s son, John, who often accompanies her, as a foil. He slumps in the auditorium, worrying that his mother is rambling or sermonising. Is this Coetzee protecting himself by pre-empting criticism? The technique of fiction within fiction is much more complicated than the ...”

“... of the household ‘Genii’ – not to mention an annual gift of £100 from Elizabeth’s cousin John Kenyon – the later letters make it clear that the Browning finances were often tight, and that Robert in particular worried about expenditure. Since he had been accused of marrying Elizabeth for her fortune – she had a small independent income, while he ...”

“... start again on a new page: in Hunting Mister Heartbreak (1990), Raban adopts a different identity (John Rayburn, Rainbird) for each place he visits. In Waxwings, set in the ‘virtual city’ of Seattle at the height of the dot.com boom, American reality bites back. A professor’s bookish enthusiasm for the ‘Jeffersonian ideal of life, liberty and the ...”

“... as well as her ingenuousness are revealed by the fact that she went first to Byron’s publisher, John Murray, who treated her with ‘much rudeness’. It was Joseph Stockdale, the Methodist pornographer of Covent Garden, who finally took the book on. Frances Wilson’s account of the scandal that followed publication is the best part of her book. The impact ...”

“... handled the countdown with more aggression and a lot more self-importance. The selector, John Hart, on their arrival in the changing room: ‘It’s going to be a long wait, boys. Time to concentrate.’ Then the coach Brian Lochore, voice breaking with emotion: ‘You’re a good team but you’re not yet a great team. If you win today you can say ...”

“... after his early winning streak, as each new play bombed, he underwent public whippings. John Simon called Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer and Sweet Bird of Youth ‘cowardly’, and, in 1978, wrote: ‘The kindest thing to assume is that Williams died shortly after completing Sweet Bird of Youth, and that his subsequent, ever more dismal ...”

“... meeting of the leaders of the national, informal ‘Protestant Establishment’. It was chaired by John Foster Dulles, who a decade later would be named secretary of state by Eisenhower. The delegates proclaimed their identity as Americans, but were highly conscious of their independence. A resolution declaring that ‘the Church as such is not at war’ was ...”

“... being female is dispelled when you consider his book’s rugged hero, a McNabian squarehead called John Porter, former SAS man and now broken-backed vodka-guzzler under the arches of Vauxhall. All these men have a chance to thwart the Ruperts by fixing – via immense personal courage and a lot of guns and knives – the unfixable, getting in and out of ...”

“... more mocking posture, in another century and in another country, assumed by the American president John Adams: “It will never be pretended that any person employed . . . had interviews with the gods, or was in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven.”’ Wittreich spends the rest of the paragraph glossing Adams, and then moves on. Notice how his ...”

“... as there was to the numerical patterns that Russell Crowe’s character, the mathematician John Nash, saw in magazine articles and Dow Jones reports in A Beautiful Mind. Nash in his illness started seeing the patterns and the threats they conveyed everywhere. He had no reality check, no filter and no way of ordering priorities. Like the American ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... full of demands for it. But it is also most unlikely that the domineering minister of justice, John Vorster, would have left such a key decision to De Wet. Vorster was Van den Bergh’s boss and the two men were close. It seems far more likely that Vorster, probably after discussion with Hendrik Verwoerd, the prime minister, decided it would not be politic ...”

“... removed from the British Empire to become a single state (doubtless under a pro-Nazi leader like John Vorster), but Germany would take Northern Rhodesia to act as a bridge between its east and west African territories. Germany would take over all of Britain’s positions in the Middle East, including its oil concessions and the Suez Canal, and also annex the ...”