“... When an ailing John Maynard Keynes travelled to the American South in March 1946, he was delighted by what he found. The ‘balmy air and bright azalean colour’ of Savannah offered a welcome reprieve from the cold and damp of London, he wrote on arriving, and the children in the streets were livelier company than the ‘irritable’ and ‘exceedingly tired’ citizens of postwar Britain ...”

“... incidents he prefers to gloss over. Ferguson had a share in the horse with the Irish businessman John Magnier, a very wealthy man whose interests (in conjunction with his associate J.P. McManus) ranged from stud farms to currency trading. What started out as a bit of fun turned deadly serious once Rock of Gibraltar began winning race after race, making him ...”

“... believe that the motive was sadism. Nor does he think, like Hitchcock’s first biographer, John Russell Taylor, that Hitchcock, far from enjoying the distress he was able to inflict on them, identified strongly with his victims. The women in the movies are, Wood proposes, ‘whatever we most fear to lose’. This ‘we’ may be just a bit too ...”

“... and fumes from coal (‘sea-coal’) burned in breweries, bakeries and glass foundries. John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, or, the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated (1661) dismissed the idea that domestic hearths had much to do with it – probably correctly at the time.Evelyn wrote about ‘Clowds of Smoak and Sulphur, so full of ...”

“... bomb. By the time the vote came round, some had changed their minds. One who had not was the Tory John Baron, a decorated former army officer with a record of opposing British intervention in Iraq, Helmand and Libya (although not in Afghanistan in 2001). ‘Even if we believed the 70,000 figure, even if we believed they were all moderates, what the strategy ...”

“... refusing to explain or to reveal. (‘He didn’t like to impose on the audience,’ the dancer John Clifford said recently, ‘but believe me, every step meant something.’) In response to Balanchine’s statement, Kendall writes: ‘Even if Serenade has no story line, its creator went to specific lengths to give it a narrative shape. He reversed the ...”

“... in the 1920s and 1930s was primitive in its sexual psychology, never more so than in the novels of John Dickson Carr. Carr, a naturalised American, could ventriloquise British understatement almost too well, as his biographical note on the back of vintage green Penguins demonstrates, noting his ‘slight difficulty that during the blitz our house was twice ...”

“... of Paris) in April 627: ‘“The world perishes and those things that are in the world” (1 John 2:17). That, however, which has been transferred to the churches, to the shrines of saints or to the poor never perishes, and is reckoned an everlasting reminder of justice.’ Two centuries​ before the pious Theodila, the heretic Pelagius had advocated a ...”

“... Hearing the news on the Today programme this morning R. nearly cries. I met Bowie only once, at John Schlesinger’s sometime in the 1980s, and remember him as a slight, almost colourless figure, who was somehow Scots. M. calls later and recalls how someone he knew picked up Bowie when he was still David Jones. He offered to come round, bringing his guitar ...”

“... the Persians, or perhaps by a renegade Roman soldier. Others believed God had taken no chances. John Malalas, the author of a sixth-century chronicle of the world that began with the Creation, reported a dream in which a bishop transported to heaven witnessed an enthroned Christ instruct the martyr-saint Mercurius: ‘Go forth and kill the emperor ...”

“... respect from the prominent British child analysts Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby. Questions were asked about the significance of the father in child development, and family therapy opened up the family as a system rather than a cult of personality. At the same time we were encouraged to believe that everything depended on what the ...”

“... If there was a single figure whose ideas seemed pertinent in that deeply ambiguous moment, it was John Maynard Keynes. The implosion of the financial system vindicated him against his critics, who had declared markets self-stabilising and government intervention counterproductive. With trade, investment and consumption collapsing and millions cast into ...”

“... first place. One number that Trump fixated on was 66 million. He had been told by the pollster John McLaughlin that if he could beat the 63 million votes he received in 2016 by three million then he was ‘absolutely guaranteed’ to be re-elected. In the event he got more than 74 million votes. He was so far ahead of what he should have needed to win that ...”

“... that a version of the Quran did exist around the time of Muhammad’s death, something the scholar John Wansbrough and some of his disciples denied for a long time, arguing that a ‘stable scriptural text’ did not emerge until up to two hundred years later. These early fragments had been erased and replaced on the top level of the palimpsest by the version ...”

“... instances made ‘more than usually irritating by meagre content spread very thin’. The poet John Ciardi, who also taught him, was more perceptive, suggesting that when Gorey found his voice his writing would be ‘either transcendent or simply pointless, depending on whether you follow it into some idea of order, or merely into the bric-à-brac of ...”