“... the rounding editor of the China Quarterly, is now a professor of history, and which has the John Fairbank Center, the pre-eminent centre for Chinese studies in the Western world. Outside the lecture theatre, protesters chanted that Jiang was a brutal tyrant; when he entered, however, many people stood up and applauded him. Earlier, students and faculty ...”

“... scandals associated with Paisley, East Ayrshire, sectarian Monklands (once the seat of the late John Smith); and, above all, Glasgow City Council and its limpet-like Lord Provost, Pat ‘Lazarus’ Lally – all these scandals led to a wave of unwelcome publicity for Scottish Labour. Nowhere is AMS needed more than in Scottish local government, as ...”

“... and tells me ideally she would vote for a bizarre dream-ticket of Bradley and Republican senator John McCain, who both advocate it. But most are straightforwardly undecided between Bradley and the other Democratic contender and favourite, Al Gore. Bradley arrives, six and a half feet tall and ramrod straight. He walks round the room, shaking hands and saying ...”

“... else. His 32 years inspired an 800-page ‘immensely researched life’ (Mariani’s words) from John Unterecker. But that was 30 years ago. Since then, Mariani tells us, ‘new readings and new information have both become available, giving us further access to Crane’s brilliant, multifoliate world.’ Mariani has managed to keep Crane’s world to just ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... her fault, poor dear. Twenty years earlier she might have been trading poisoned darts with John Barrymore. But she and her sorority sisters were condemned to representing a girdled, uplifted world whose only edges were in the bones and stitching of their foundation garments. Faced with so much overwhelmingly off-putting evidence, the feminists, and ...”

“... terrorism, legitimising more and more suspensions of legal and other rights? The ominous aspect of John Ashcroft’s recent claim that ‘terrorists use America’s freedom as a weapon against us’ carries the obvious implication that we should limit our freedom in order to defend ourselves. Such statements from top American officials, especially Rumsfeld and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... portrait has is ‘character’, she notes briskly, something altogether different from John Singer Sargent’s vapid sitters. Here the critic’s way of looking ‘as a woman’ means fully recognising Cassatt’s achievement in bringing ignored and devalued female subject-matter into the painting of modern life – the world of upper-class ...”

“... of a traditional stripe do cross the stage. There is an excellent discussion of the problem set John Locke by his correspondent Molyneux: supposing a man born blind, who can tell a cube from a sphere by touch, would he, if granted his sight by surgery or miracle, be able to recognise the objects just by looking? Bishop Berkeley, nowadays regarded as a ...”

“... 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 ...”