“... Cranmer would also have called the Church of England ‘Catholic’, but in the sense that John Calvin or Heinrich Bullinger would likewise have called their Churches ‘Catholic’: they were all parts of the Universal Church which had rejected the medieval corruptions of the Church of Rome in order to regain an authentic Catholicity. Many ...”

“... most populous city in the world. The mood is one of retrospective nostalgia (the translation is John Whaley’s): Twenty years I let time run And enjoyed the lot I drew; Unmarred lovely years, each one, Like the Barmecides once knew. Goethe also borrows motifs and tropes from Firdusi and Rumi: their verse is erotic, languishing, potent, full of deep ...”

“... of ‘deference to the authority of Leibniz’, combined with a short-sighted mistrust of honest John Locke, might be responsible for the ‘striking contrast between the characteristical features of the continental philosophy . . . and those of contemporary systems which have succeeded each other in our own island’. By that time various posthumous ...”

“... called it ‘an unmitigated mockery of Eisenstein’s intention’. The British documentary maker John Grierson’s verdict on Thunder over Mexico was that ‘the clouds and the cactus will pass for great photography among the hicks.’ ¡Que Viva México! has had a complex afterlife. The Sinclairs extracted two more shorts from the footage – Eisenstein in ...”

“... The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Post-Socialist Change (1999) and more briefly in John Gray’s The Immortalisation Commission.* Preserving Lenin’s body from further decay is a bit like painting the Forth Bridge: every 18 months the body is bathed in a potassium acetate-glycerin solution and careful maintenance done on the accumulating skin ...”

“... will, you will live on in future people who have legitimate interests. You will live on in what John Stuart Mill called ‘the onward rush’ of humanity. It may be objected that really you’re expanding your self in this case, rather than dissolving it. But to do the former is to do the latter, given the practical human situation, and Johnston gives a ...”

“... a mature ethics might take generations to formulate. ‘Actions are right,’ the utilitarian John Stuart Mill wrote, ‘in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.’ At times, however, duty and the general happiness seem to be in conflict. If a recently dead husband had been leading a secret ...”

“... isn’t the first fictional character to train for a supernaturally revealed task. The hero of John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany, for instance, must master a particular basketball shot in order to fulfil his destiny by saving a group of children. It may be that the literary form best suited to dramatising forks in the road, paths taken and not ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to London, re-establishing a household with Holtby. Catlin joined them – and his children, John (born 1927) and Shirley (born 1930) – whenever he could. There is much to admire about Brittain’s insistence on her right to live in a new way: to have children but also a career; to marry but live where and with whom she liked. The wildfire success of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”