“... and teaching at Iowa at the time, and became familiar with the ideas of Southern Agrarians such as John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, whose wife, Caroline Gordon, would become an astute reader of drafts of O’Connor’s stories, and a staunch literary advocate. T.S. Eliot, the great hero of the New Critics, and of the Agrarians also, inevitably loomed large ...”

“... my own brain back.’ Within a few days it was as though I was exploding from the inside, like John Hurt in Alien, except that instead of having one alien embryo about to burst from my chest I had thousands. I was in a state of constant claustrophobic panic and could barely get out of bed. My wife called our family doctor, Dr J., who is also a friend, to ...”

“... soon looked up. According to one estimate, he came to own 50,000 acres in County Kerry alone. John Aubrey estimated his rental income at its height at £18,000 a year – perhaps £27 million in today’s money. In a nice closing of the causal circle, Irish land capitalised the rest of Petty’s career, including the projects in political arithmetic that ...”

“... says. You might indeed hope for a miracle, at that price. It costs £33.50 for 56.7 grams from John Lewis, which works out at £591 per kilo; at the time of writing, the price of silver is around £420. But you can’t rub solid silver into your wrinkles: even in the form of a necklace, it can only adorn; it cannot transform. Jones asks: What are ...”

“... absolute blast. Over more than 500 pages, its narrative only rarely fails to grip.’ According to John Walsh in the Independent, ‘the 500-plus pages of Life throb with energy, pulsate with rhythm and reverberate with good stories.’ And in case you think it’s just a boy thing, Michiko Kakutani, awarded a Pulitzer for her ‘fearless and ...”

“... Strachey found something of the same attraction in Newton’s older contemporary, the biographer John Aubrey. Strachey saw himself as the product of an ‘embryonic generation’ almost as remote now from the Victorians as Aubrey had been from the Middle Ages, yet as Aubrey was haunted by the lost world of medieval magic, so Strachey and the other club ...”

“... peace was embraced by thinkers who, in the early 16th century, included men like the theologian John Colet, Thomas More and their presiding genius, Erasmus. In England, policymakers bought into the idea of peace for pragmatic reasons as much as out of ideological conviction. As Henry VII’s former minister Edmund Dudley put it in 1509, in a treatise ...”

“... it’s being republished now with the open aim of reaching the sizeable audience that resurrected John Williams’s Stoner and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road. All three books share an interest in sad marriages and a certain amount of diffuse self-pity, but strenuous Flaubertian realism as practised on a mid-20th-century American campus, provided in ...”

“... with references to the idea of ‘informal empire’ as developed by the British historians John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson in the early 1950s, but their famous article was actually about what they called ‘the imperialism of free trade’: free trade guaranteed the British world economic dominance because they had exclusive control of the high ...”

“... politics. But what Hutton calls the ‘new model of ancient Celticity’, introduced in 2010 by John Koch and Barry Cunliffe in Celtic from the West, sees the spread of Celtic languages as a consequence of the existence of an Atlantic trade route rather than ‘waves of invasion’. Trade doesn’t necessarily bring peace. Slave shackles have been found at ...”

“... quiescent Palestinian leadership in Ramallah and disrupt the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that John Kerry had launched in the same month as Sisi’s coup. But Hamas felt too vulnerable, especially because of Sisi’s potential role in any new conflict between Gaza and Israel, to take this route. It was sure that the peace talks would fail on their own. The ...”

“... newspapers we knew that Europe was the future; its parliament, if not exactly sexy, at least made John Major’s backbenchers foam at the mouth. And maybe Derrida’s trademarked ‘always already’, or Barthes’s writer who ‘can only imitate a gesture that is … never original’, spoke with more than usual force, in those end-of-historyish times, to ...”

“... three-storey neo-Byzantine block’. Graffiti, something new and shocking in a Soviet context when John Bushnell’s Moscow Graffiti came out in 1990, is not one of the forms of popular creativity Hatherley embraces, perhaps because its absence was (and remains) such a feature of the Moscow Metro, the focus of Hatherley’s greatest enthusiasm. After lovingly ...”

“... the golden bough itself with awkward political accommodations. He described the SDLP politician John Hume as an Aeneas seeking to bridge worlds: ‘Neither his long record of political probity nor his large peace-seeking purpose was sufficient to constitute the political equivalent of a golden bough that would guarantee him a safe return from the ...”

“... realisation that Americans, too, lived in a political order, when news reached him while abroad of John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry. (Before that moment, he claims, characteristically, that he owed his entire idea of politics to the illustrations in Punch.) All this in two early pages of A Small Boy, though by a more conventional measure of ...”