“... of that state of mind was harshly illuminated by Caitlin Thomas, adopted daughter of Augustus John and wife of Dylan, in her autobiography, Leftover Life to Kill. She was no Mimi. As promiscuous, drunk and inclined to throw furniture as her husband, she was nevertheless unable to conceive of herself as anything other than the poet’s wife. Of her ...”

“... many dilemmas, one way to deal with this one is by not thinking about it much. This displays, in John Dunn’s apt phrase, the cunning of unreason. The alternative is to embrace doublethink. We, the People, are the democratic sovereign: it is by popular demand that the monarch rules over us, her subjects. Or, the Queen is naturally our better, but like the ...”

“... of Ceres’ womb, that her reaper-lovers had got upon her – to suit their double-columned books. John Barleycorn must die a second death, when bankers rule, as Spengler shows, till Caesar comes. Jones’s skills have not exactly deserted him: there is still the historical knowledge, the talent for allusion and association, and some distinctive ...”

“... that such a tag would seem appropriate to describe any other poet of the 20th century. Why her? John Ashbery’s praise for Bishop as a ‘writer’s writer’s writer’, whose work ‘inspires in writers of every sort’ an ‘extraordinarily intense loyalty’, seems apt. And Ashbery knew that to say such a thing might be to pay ‘an ambiguous ...”

“... with proper games. In Stryker’s Run, for example, you controlled a character called Commander John Stryker, who had to convey an urgent top-secret message from one futuristic army base to another. What this meant, in practice, was running along past a monotonous scrolling backdrop of uniform mountains, shooting any enemy soldiers you encountered along the ...”

“... as those middling public figures who were also important to the history of Tudor literature: John Heywood, Sir Thomas Elyot, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, ‘writers who in one way or another tried to come to terms with the experience of writing under a despotic monarch’. Walker’s strength is that he understands and engages intimately with the ...”

“... film-maker and accountant were members, along with Rotten – now using his more sober real name, John Lydon – and three other musicians. In October, PiL released their first product, a single called, with corporate thoroughness, ‘Public Image’. It was a streamlined, surging noise that hadn’t been heard before, and reached number nine in the ...”

“... though David Scott of Apollo 15 has become a recluse, Armstrong doesn’t do interviews, and while John Young of Apollo 16 made a speech at Smith, both eye and mind contact seemed impossible for him. None of them found celebrity easy, least of all the crew of Apollo 11, for whom there were no predecessors to show them how it was done. Caught between a ...”

“... anniversary of a school that one of Luther’s followers wrested away from the monastery of St John in 1529 and renamed the Johanneum. Great figures of the German Enlightenment had taught or studied there; C.P.E. Bach and Telemann had been music masters during the 18th century. All this is to make clear that my image of my father before I knew him is of a ...”

“... Parisians could hardly contain themselves during the first season of the Ballets Russes in 1909. John Singer Sargent’s painting, Vaslav Nijinsky in ‘Le Pavillon d’Armide’, captures the long-necked, outrageous spectacle of this new animal of dance. All of Proust’s characters were there in the audience, and they had never seen anything as exotic as ...”

“... Adam Smith, was the theory of the marketplace of ideas. In the mouth of Justice Holmes, echoing John Stuart Mill, this became part of the jurisprudence of the First Amendment: ‘The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.’ Holmes’s dictum is cited by Lord Steyn in a significant recent ...”

“... Cheyne and his diet. He was favourably quoted in Tom Jones; Samuel Johnson commended his books; John Wesley’s Primitive Physick copied out whole sections of Cheyne’s work; and his patients included Pope, Gay, Beau Nash, Richardson, the Methodist Countess of Huntingdon, Robert Walpole’s adolescent daughter, Catherine (who died under Cheyne’s care of ...”

“... young men’ – James again – as Oliver Wendell Holmes, the future legal scholar John Chipman Gray, and James himself. If Gordon tends to assume rather than show that Woolson’s work has been underrated, her respectful account is a welcome alternative to Edel’s faint condescension; and she makes a persuasive case for the way a sequence of ...”

“... goes into the opulent restaurant there, and never leaves behind him less than 40 roubles.’ John Lehmann watched him giving ‘huge tips’ to the waiters. Edmund Wilson noted that he would ‘offset the bristling and slant-eyed mask appearance that recalled the Muscovite tsars by a giggle that suggested Edward Lear’. And in 1936 Vera Suvchinskaya ...”

“... its subject the illiterate but well-informed and litigious lead miners of the Peak Country; or of John Walter’s Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (1999) which, without being able to put a single name to any of the Colchester plunderers of 1642 (the historian of the Pilgrimage of Grace is very much better off), deciphers the popular ...”