“... like Sackville-West but, not yet 21, needed parental permission. Her father, the shipping magnate John Ellerman, refused. He didn’t want his daughter, whom he called Dolly, to be anything other than frills and curls. Bryher – who renamed herself after one of the Scilly Isles when she was in her mid-twenties, who felt like a boy trapped in the wrong body ...”

“... there.Is there a founding Bosch cosmology? In Berlin, on the back of a large panel showing Saint John on Patmos, Bosch painted a vision of the universe. (There are others in his work: this one strikes me as the most deeply felt.) It is organised in concentric circles. In the innermost ring there’s a mountain with a single touch of fire at its base – the ...”

“... in part to buy time while composing the next line. (As it happens, Parry corresponded with John and Alan Lomax, who travelled around the American South recording folk musicians.) ‘The singer of tales,’ Parry later wrote, ‘has no pen and ink to let him slowly work out a novel way of recounting novel actions, but must make up his tale without ...”

“... of itself,’ he says in his Study of Thomas Hardy, a sentiment which might have been uttered by John Stuart Mill himself. But what Lawrence meant by ‘self’ was not to be confused with the ‘cheap egotism’ of the ‘self-conscious little ego’ described by modern individualism. ‘I know that life, and life only, is the clue to the ...”

“... of evidence on Trump himself is puzzling after the strenuous emphasis of Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan; this looks like another sign that impeachment is not something to count on. ‘Foreign emoluments’ is the most plausible charge, but the phrase has a distant sound and one of the words will need explaining. And yet, the idea of a ...”

“... any woman the fate in question. May Bartram dies near the end of the novella, of course, while John Marcher marches on, devoting some time to waffling about how he had now suffered the dreaded blow – that he had missed the chance to love May. May’s fate, he tells himself, wasn’t so terrible, since she got to love him. OK. I thought also of the varied ...”

“... one does: ‘When I was in graduate school I was startled to find this story’s source in The John Collier Reader, – or so I have always believed until this afternoon, when I first riffled, then paged carefully, front to back, back to front, through the local copy (Knopf, 1972) and discovered no trace of such a story anywhere in the book.’ But over ...”

“... that he won’t, not until he can be sure an amenable successor will be elected in his place. John McDonnell is due to present an amendment at the Labour Party Conference in September that would reduce the proportion of MPs needed to nominate a leader from 15 per cent of the parliamentary party to 5 per cent. This rule change may come to seem less ...”

“... in office. For twenty years after 1846, Liberal government was kept on the road not just by Lord John Russell and Palmerston but by their two most reliable and businesslike cabinet supporters: Sir George Grey, Charles’s nephew, and Sir Charles Wood, Charles’s son-in-law. Commentators fond of political flamboyance considered both men dispensable, but ...”

“... that it addresses is itself antinomic. After contrasting Matisse with artists as different as John Heartfield and Andy Warhol, Clark concludes: ‘The choice, however, is a false one. For it seems to be the very nature of the 20th century that it invites, in a sense prescribes, entirely opposite and contradictory art tactics in face of its ...”

“... bankruptcy of believing that ‘more’ is the same as ‘better’ have an even longer history. John Stuart Mill (among others) argued that humans are best served by a society in which ‘no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.’ More recently, the ...”

“... by the Tory life peer Dido Harding, herself a former McKinsey consultant. Harding’s husband, John Penrose, another former McKinsey consultant and a Tory MP, was at the time the ‘anti-corruption champion’ at the Home Office. During the pandemic, he hit the headlines for trying to absolve Owen Paterson, a fellow Tory MP, who had improperly lobbied on ...”

“... that the partisans had selfish, sectional aims. There’s something in both views.Via Rasella, as John Foot has observed, is seen both as a ‘heroic act of war’ and ‘a pointless and vanguardist terrorist attack’. Bentivegna belonged to the Gruppi di Azione Patriottica, which was dominated by communists and socialists (he was a Trotskyite). Many thought ...”

“... including many complaints about army regulations that prohibited Afro hairstyles. A 1969 report by John Kester, a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, noted that young soldiers hated having to have their hair cut ‘much shorter’ than ‘fashionable civilian men’. ‘The modern young man,’ he wrote, ‘is extremely jealous of his individuality ...”

“... Keynesian economics has borrowed from monetarist and Lucasian thinking. As the Stanford economist John Taylor – who may not be Blinder’s kind of new Keynesian, but is a new Keynesian nonetheless – put it, ‘the rational expectations hypothesis is by far the most common expectations assumption used in macroeconomic research today.’ Taylor even claims ...”