“... the 1960s and 1970s, in books like Geoffrey Ashe’s The Quest for Arthur’s Britain (1968) and John Morris’s The Age of Arthur (1973). Professional historians have long been embarrassed by the whole thing, but the image created – Roman cavalry leader rallies the British after the Roman army withdrawal and fights off hordes of invading Angles and Saxons ...”

“... Glenway Wescott, who knew him for 30 years, described him to an earlier Sitwell biographer, John Pearson, as a ‘really terrible person’ and ‘psychopathological’. Greene, who has had access to the Sitwell-Tchelitchew correspondence, embargoed when Pearson was writing, has found nothing to contradict this verdict or his own summary of ...”

“... striking attitudes with the duff public art we passed along the way. Our most love to loathe is John Ravera’s In Town, an anodised couple chucking their malshapen baby between them, which stands at the southern end of Battersea Bridge. We stopped at a vintage comic store in Putney where the proprietor, although a ringer for Comic Book Guy in The ...”

“... back on stage a year later and complained he had lost ‘$35 million in an hour’. The journalist John Hockenberry was fired from New York Public Radio when old allegations of workplace bullying were suddenly deemed sufficient. This happened just before an article about his sexual behaviour was published. He is one of the few men who have attempted to write ...”

“... Essex in 1953 and 1955. He then turns to Raphael Samuel’s interviews in Stevenage in 1959-60 and John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood’s surveys in Cambridge and Luton in the early 1960s to trace the way migration to the ‘new towns’ and rising prosperity affected those attitudes. Next he mines the questionnaires gathered by researchers working with ...”

“... University, where the novel stages a postdated, highly fanciful version of Derrida’s clash with John Searle and pushes the boat out still further on the story’s farcical and shaggy-dog aspects. Methodological tensions play out like scuffles between the Jets and the Sharks: ‘You analytic pricks!’ ‘Take your Derrida boys and piss ...”

“... his important 1997 book based on the newly opened Soviet archives, We Now Know, the Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis took a post-revisionist approach. He argued that Cold War studies should focus on the battle of ideas, and not just on military power, since the Soviet Union fell not as a result of military defeat or an economic crash but because of a collapse ...”

“... would have turned not to Jewish men like Shylock but to Christians like Shakespeare’s father, John (who was accused of illegal usury at least twice). The small population of Jews in medieval England had been expelled in 1290 and would not be readmitted until 1656, nearly half a century after Shakespeare’s death. This didn’t stop the English of ...”

“... reproduction of Balthasar Denner’s 1721 painting Alte Frau to a touching remembrance of the late John Berger to a dual meditation on ageing – ‘the great unsexing’, as she calls it, ‘the disappearance of gender, over time’ – and the unencumbered way her father thought about art. All this makes her ask of herself: ‘Who am I to speak of this ...”

“... Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald – almost any actor who appeared in a John Hughes teen film qualified). The Literary Brat Pack was a journalistic readymade, roping together a number of writers who may have scarcely known each other and treating them as a floating soirée. It was cartoonish and unfair to most of the individuals ...”

“... practices or ecological collapse. Certainly one can see in Melville’s heirs – notably in the John Steinbeck of Cannery Row – a premonitory recognition of the damage done by human beings to marine ecology, but Melville’s gaze is always that squinting vision of the mid-19th-century adventurer-cum-naturalist-cum-money-maker, for whom a whale is a ...”

“... time: Cyril Radcliffe served on the Boundary Commission for India, while the egregiously indolent John Sparrow would shortly be asked if he would provide a constitution for Pakistan, a request about which he made the characteristic observation, ‘Declined: too busy with my practice at Lincoln’s Inn.’ A fellow of an earlier generation, Viscount ...”

“... transcriptions from de Mailla’s 18th-century Histoire générale de la Chine and the writings of John Adams, the head of a great Confucian American dynasty. What awaited them now was a reviving cocktail of Pound’s trademark bohemian-pantheism. The inspiration for the Pisan Cantos was a visionary encounter on a hillside near Sant’ Ambrogio with a barefoot ...”

“... hellfire – ‘yikes’, as Nomi says when this choice confronts her. Tash, who likes sex and John Lennon and string bikini underwear, is clearly hell-bound, despite her little sister’s fervent prayers on her behalf. Nomi too has a Dionysian streak, but her every hedonistic impulse is accompanied by the sharpening of diabolic knives. Nomi’s East ...”

“... is an imbalance) had almost exhausted their capital and feared bankruptcy. The exchange’s chair, John Phelan, later told the Wall Street Journal that he feared that if the exchange closed, ‘we would never open it.’ The crash of October 1987 had no clear-cut external cause: no oil shock, no massive government default, no Twin Towers. It ...”