“... weighing every word, syllable and letter. ‘Mr Newton is really a very valuable man,’ as John Locke put it, ‘not onely for his wonderfull skill in Mathematicks but in divinity too & his great knowledge in the scriptures where in I know few his equals.’ Newton read the Bible with the same exactness he brought to his mathematical inventions or his ...”

“... mother bombarded him with advice; his tutor at Cambridge was the future archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift; and his godfather, the Earl of Bedford, provided him with a seat in Parliament. But he was short of money and had expensive tastes. He became a barrister at Gray’s Inn, rising rapidly to become a highly successful advocate and legal adviser to ...”

“... Dead Jane Bowles’ to the title page. She’d gained a new kind of recognition but was still, in John Ashbery’s description, a ‘writer’s writer’s writer’, and the emphasis on her originality as a prose stylist and as a weird and wonderful creature has often functioned as a backhanded compliment, casting her as a tortured eccentric, her writing a ...”

“... art is by no means uniform. ‘Tear up and burn as much as possible,’ she said to her husband, John Middleton Murry, who, with his own publishing interests at heart and a sensibility that favoured a wife leaving a certain kind of literary legacy behind her, did nothing of the kind: so her output can sometimes look sketchy or inconsequential, sometimes ...”

“... monopoly law. But the rules could be waived when losses amounted to financial urgency and John Biffen, the trade secretary and one of the more likeable Tories of the time, pretended falsely that this was the case, when in fact the Times’s losses were covered by the Sunday Times’s profits. The appalling Woodrow Wyatt later gloated that he had fixed ...”

“... has become everything. This is a man who has written just as convincingly on Don DeLillo as on John Donne, on Kazuo Ishiguro as on Joachim of Flora. But then this is one way of thinking of his special gifts as a critic. Nothing is a ‘field’ for him, there are no fences or trees in the way. The main army can camp anywhere; the avant-garde can camp ...”

“... shaming. ‘I denounce you as the Antichrist,’ he shouted, in the European Parliament, at Pope John Paul II. ‘Harlot’ was also a favourite, but this was rarely applied to an actual woman, being reserved for the Church of Rome. The same applied to ‘whore’, as in, ‘of Babylon’. The purity, in this uncracked patriarchy, of their own women, was a ...”

“... We learn what W.V. Quine wrote about the word ‘solstice’ in a personal letter to Sen, what John Sparrow said about the Good Samaritan parable over dinner at All Souls, and why Piero Sraffa used to rub his chin when chatting to Wittgenstein at Trinity. No doubt each of these tales forms a filament, however frail, in the pendant damask of our human ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to similar conclusions about the counter-revolutionary value of pluralism. And in the Old South, John Calhoun formulated his theory of concurrent majorities – an already fragmented society would be further fragmented by the near impossibility of the national government’s taking concerted action on behalf of the majority – as a counter to the ...”

“... nationalism had gone on long enough. Chile’s nationalisations, Nixon’s Treasury secretary, John Connally, said, threatened to provoke a ‘snowballing’ of similar expropriations throughout the region, which Washington could no longer afford to deal with in a ‘piecemeal fashion’. There was a metaphysics of Allende-hating that went beyond matters ...”