“... was in crisis. Fergus Henderson serves good English food (roasted bone marrow, potted beef) at St John beside Smithfield Market and April Bloomfield does well with rollmops and devils on horseback at the Spotted Pig in Greenwich Village. And above all there’s the rising global influence of a cuisine scarcely mentioned in Steinberger’s book. When food ...”

“... over several years. For instance, I was almost sure I would tackle the distinguished art critic John Russell’s Paris (1960), ‘with photographs by Brassaï’, but never got past the pictures. I had slightly less confidence about Maxime Du Camp’s six-volume Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle ...”

“... in troops, seeing in him the ‘great terrorist’ he had been waiting for, or at least the John the Baptist who would come before. Whether or not he was technically a member of Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling, which became an important issue at the time of his postwar trial (he was not a great joiner: the likelihood is that his wife Marie paid his ...”

“... in many of the events it became involved with over the last 50 years – the Profumo affair; the John Stonehouse mystery; Peter Wright; a score of famous spy cases; the Northern Ireland conflict; the miners’ strikes; the Gibraltar shootings; the Lockerbie bombing; ‘Room 101’; the thrilling escape of the defector Oleg Gordievsky; the killing of WPC ...”

“... formats and with new translations by the excellent Anthea Bell,* it seems to be succeeding – John Fowles (a representatively Anglo-Saxon e and u crossbreed) wrote: ‘Stefan Zweig has suffered, since his death in 1942, a darker eclipse than any other famous writer of this century. Even “famous writer” understates the prodigious reputation he enjoyed ...”

“... how can repeal make any difference to that right’s continued application within Britain? The John Terry case notwithstanding, the right to privacy, for example, is now pretty well established in the British courts, as are the changes to the restrictions on the powers of the police, which may originally have been inspired by the convention but which take ...”

“... the cloud of unknowing. The first work of Beard’s I reviewed was an exhibition she curated with John Henderson at the Ashmolean nearly 25 years ago called simply ‘The Exhibition’, the aim of which, so far as I can remember, was to shatter the glass certainties of the vitrine with some outrageous labels, hidden objects and a trail of paper ...”

“... that they couldn’t compete with this ‘circus procession’. Where suffragettes, following John Stuart Mill, argued from a position of equality, Nancy founded her plea on difference: what she deemed to be the essential qualities of women, hitherto lacking in British politics. She happily called herself an ‘ardent feminist’ and later ...”

“... surveillance helicopters take off, is closer still to Matthew Allen’s High Beach Asylum where John Clare, distracted by agricultural enclosures, was lodged. But it was the launcher site in Oxleas Wood, where locals had fought hard (and successfully) against motorway incursions, that I wanted to inspect. Leaning on his stick, Steve was waiting at North ...”

“... furniture; a deep window ledge held a small number of books: The Highland Clearances by John Prebble, pamphlets on local flora, a field guide to birds, Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water. After we’d unpacked, we went for a stroll over the salt marsh. The tide was out, leaving creeks and channels. A bridge spanned the river that ran, swollen ...”

“... say. It was the success of the competition that brought him up short. First had come The Gallery, John Horne Burns’s novel about the Allied occupation of Naples, which Heller admired. That gave him pause. Then Norman Mailer’s huge war novel, The Naked and the Dead, stopped him cold. Heller realised immediately that any war novel he was then likely to ...”

“... his desperate ‘struggling, striving, writhing, clutching’ for power from his wincing colleague John Morley. The real challenge facing leaders in a media democracy was – as it still is – to focus minds. In 1886, the Pall Mall Gazette stated matter-of-factly that to be ‘interesting’ was the ‘one quality which in these days is essential to a ...”

“... post-Svevo, post-Musil narrative, the ‘literature of exhaustion’ once celebrated by John Barth, can and should be flushed down the ‘latrine’ (one of Naipaul’s favourite words). Naipaul then sets his ideal against his imagined enemy: what he terms ‘the self-serving “writing schools” of the United States and England’. He attempts to ...”

“... a train, which he – who once walked to Stuttgart – couldn’t possibly have afforded to take. John Berryman wrote: ‘The Bachgesellschaft girdles the world.’ So it ...”

“... the citizenry cannot hold them accountable for flaunting [sic] environmental and labour laws,’ John Blessing Karumbidze observes. Though they often detest the World Bank and other citadels of Western power, many of these activists realise that the conditions Western lenders impose on African governments do help to ensure that the money reaches beyond the ...”