“... Permit a personal note. I pride myself on being a professional. I’ve reviewed epic borers by John Barth and Harold Brodkey that would have broken the spirit of Cochise. Here I nearly met my match. It took every ounce of fading willpower to get through word-choked pages in The Black Veil that seemed to stare back, defying anyone to finish them, sentences ...”

“... post-industrial societies, private ownership has started to lose its central regulating role. John Berger recently wrote about a French advert for an Internet broker called Selftrade. Under an image of a solid gold hammer and sickle studded with diamonds, the caption reads: ‘And if the stock market profited everybody?’ The strategy is ...”

“... unquestioningly informs us that the Madonna stopped the bullet that would otherwise have killed John Paul II, or that the miraculous liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro has once again occurred in Naples, Garibaldi’s radical anti-clericalism is not welcome, nor is his scathing criticism of every exasperated party interest, whether on the left or ...”

“... improbable scenario came to pass earlier this year and on 9 July, the SPLA commander in chief, John Garang, flew to Khartoum to be sworn in as vice president. Garang died in a helicopter crash only 22 days later but his successor, Salva Kiir, is likely to consummate the peace deal. But even if Sudan returns to war, it will not be a renewed jihad aimed at ...”

“... of entire social groups that happen to get in the way. And then there is what Michael Walzer and John Rawls both call a ‘supreme emergency’, when direct attacks on civilian targets are required in circumstances of dire military necessity. Since, in the nuclear age, ‘supreme emergency has become a permanent condition,’ this means that it is legitimate ...”

“... but the sheer coincidence of a Jacobean dramatist and a legendary director sharing the name John Ford. So perhaps it takes a formalist to know one. But the contemporary formalist whose approach converges most sharply on Herbert’s is the sculptor Cornelia Parker. For a piece called Measuring Liberty with a Dollar (1998), for instance, Parker took a ...”

“... of the labour aristocracy. This is the more significant because it forms the core of the thesis of John Foster’s justly celebrated book on Oldham, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution. In Oldham, it was held, the move from political radicalism to class stability depended essentially upon the emergence of abstinent labour aristocrats, like the mule ...”

“... Lowell is only to be so described when he is writing at his lowest ebb and, rather than leave John Berryman out altogether, I have selected work by him which may well though not indisputably be judged unrepresentative – since if poetry is a public matter it is not the place for private revelations, and if it is not a public matter it has no place in a ...”

“... pain’, though he adds that, if it is true that ‘classical utilitarians like Bentham and John Stuart Mill used “pleasure” ... to include achieving what one desired’ and vice versa, then ‘the difference between classical utilitarianism and utilitarianism based on interests disappears.’ In fact, achieving what one desires is not always ...”

“... that survived in the 1720s were the people who adopted the label as a form of self-assertion (Sir John Hyde Cotton of Madingley is an obvious example), men who had absolutely no intention of risking so much as a farthing on the cause; and those who, like William Shippen, used it as a title for their disgust at the mechanisms and ethos of Whig rule and who ...”

“... teaching, and which might therefore be approved without apparent inconsistency. Second, Pope John XXIII, elected in 1958 as a ‘caretaker’ pontiff, had surprised everyone by encouraging Catholics to re-examine many aspects of their faith previously regarded as sacrosanct. In 1962 he called for a second Vatican Council to reinterpret the Catholic faith ...”

“... was referring to the ‘Quarterly Journal of Socialist Humanism’ launched by E.P. Thompson and John Saville in 1957 as a forum for what they called ‘Britain’s largest unorganised party – the ex-communist party’. The New Reasoner ran to ten issues before being absorbed into the fledgling New Left Review, and it included a memorable essay by ...”

“... the ideological mix was less conventional. At the party’s 2013 gathering in Rome, images of John Paul II, Thatcher, Gandhi and Mother Teresa were projected beside those of bona fide fathers of fascism such as D’Annunzio and Marinetti. The 2022 congress displayed cardboard cut-outs of Hannah Arendt, the Fellini collaborator Ennio Flaiano and ...”

“... expected to be strictly apolitical; the independence of the judiciary is considered sacrosanct. John Rawls went to extraordinary lengths to imagine an ‘original position’ in which everyone would be capable of agreeing on the principles of social justice: in it, each of us would be ignorant of our own social status and effectively function as an outside ...”

“... for those branches of medicine that dealt with the mental and the moral. In the 1860s, John Langdon Down, medical superintendent of the Earlswood Asylum for Idiots in Surrey, noted that the faces of certain patients had the characteristics of different ethnic groups; he named one syndrome ‘Mongolism’ and the afflicted as ...”