“... demanding. In a perceptive if slightly laboured chapter that draws largely on the clinical work of John Bowlby, Wood describes Constant’s childhood – which included learning Greek at the age of five from a sadistic tutor – and its role in forming a personality characterised by an obsession with death, by uncertainty and indecision, and by a general ...”

“... different requirements for entry, and boys and girls spent their days travelling for interviews. John Morrison, the tutor of Trinity, tried to get the colleges to agree to a uniform procedure, but Armitage of Queen’s and Pratt of Christ’s fought him until the establishment of UCCA forced Cambridge to take its head out of the sand. Another reason was ...”

“... he and Hill had made their own. Witness to the Beast finds the filiation in the sect founded by John Reeve and Ludowick Muggleton in 1652. Blake’s mother, Thompson suggests, may have been a Muggletonian, and many of his notions must have been derived from their brand of antinomianism. The respect and affection he shows for this mild, diminutive band is ...”

“... readerships. Thus Ascherson joins the oddly-assorted, lively company of Primo Levi, Oliver Sacks, John Berger, Edward Said and Germaine Greer – but from a slippery starting-point: the journalist is a specialist in nothing. Sometimes he seems to know that only too well, and to underrate his own contribution. Calling for work on the growing power of an ...”

“... wilderness renamed is still a wilderness,’ writes Lawson-Peebles in apparent agreement with John Quincy Adams and Joseph Hall, both of whom had scorned the ‘edenic’ fables told about the West. But is it? Yes, in the sense that you can still starve or freeze or get eaten in it. But we’re talking about writing and reading here. To an audience ...”

“... Pollock was distancing himself from Benton. Some time in the late Thirties he began to frequent John Graham, that most mysterious of all the gurus of European Modernism. Graham took him up, reinforcing his faith in unconscious imagery. From now on, Pollock transferred his admiration and his envy to Picasso, enlarging his ambition to a world scale. Guernica ...”

“... such as Ann Fleming, Diana Cooper and Nancy Mitford. But he became obsessed by trying to convert John Betjeman to his own faith, and bombarded the poet with furious injunctions to submit. ‘If you try to base your life and hopes on logical absurdities YOU WILL GO MAD,’ he wrote, adding, with a sentence which is not distinguished for its sanity: ‘It ...”

“... into Marxist discourse with Third World progressives.’ Wannabet? A key chapter by Robin Broad, John Cavanagh and Walden Bello on ‘Sustainable Development in the Nineties’ attacks capitalist development strategies in the Third World and details all manner of ecological disasters they have caused. Not many years ago this would have served as prologue to ...”

“... His books appear to be conceived on the principle laid down by Dr Greenslade at the beginning of John Buchan’s The Three Hostages, as the proper way to write a ‘shocker’: ‘The author writes the story inductively, and the reader follows it deductively ... I begin by fixing on one or two facts which have no obvious connection ... imagine anything you ...”

“... social life. The major single piece of progress has consisted in a documentary discovery made by John Shearman and Webster Smith. They showed that the painting originally hung not in the villa of Castello, which belonged after 1477 or 1478 to Lorenzo’s cousin, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, but in Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco’s city house – a ...”

“... at Bootham School may have provoked an immediate countervailing effect in a cynical repudiation of John Bright; but in Birmingham Town Hall on 12 May 1958, exactly one hundred years after Bright had spoken there, Taylor concluded his own speech to a CND meeting by echoing Bright’s words (and shed his own tears with his old history master afterwards). What ...”

“... has used his scholarship to write an exceptionally wise biography called Menlove – the life of John Menlove Edwards, one of the strongest and boldest climbers between the wars and the chief explorer of the cliffs round Llanberis and the Ogwen valley in Snowdonia.* Edwards was a psychiatrist in Liverpool, noted for his success with difficult psychosomatic ...”

“... them and nothing in the future, with Rogers thinking about living in the USA and his partner John Young looking into minicab driving, the RIBA asked them to submit material for consideration by an unnamed client. Lloyd’s were looking for an architect. They needed, not just space, but a plan which would allow business to go on while building ...”

“... and the reasons for their involvement in the Spanish Civil War’ (the other two writers are John Cornford and Julian Bell, the subjects of Journey to the Frontier). This is ingenious, but not convincing: the book reads like what it obviously is, a piece of an abandoned project, a part of an unwritable life. Once more, there is no indication of any help ...”

“... the sentence ‘unacceptable’ to speakers of the language. For example, in the sentence ‘John loves Mary,’ ‘loves’ may be replaced by ‘hates’ or ‘eats’, but not by ‘but’, ‘thinks that’ or ‘swims’. Now consider another example, discussed at length by Barthes in his Eléments de Sémiologie, the example of the menu. A man ...”