“... what happens if Assad refuses to compromise over a transitional government in the next few weeks. John Kerry, the US secretary of state, who has done the heavy diplomatic lifting in getting the International Syria Support Group and the Geneva talks going, is said to have urged Obama on several occasions over the last year to fire American missiles at certain ...”

“... minister, that the bank’s autonomy over monetary policy should no longer be taken for granted. John McDonnell has said that it would be brought to heel in the first week of a Labour government. After the 2016 US election, some assumed that Donald Trump would end the Fed’s independence. But so far he has done little besides expressing his disapproval when ...”

“... predictable Tory attitudes – disparagement of the welfare state, of long-haired young men: ‘John Lennon so repellent-looking now’ – taking swipes at student politics and much else. Larkin became a regular correspondent and an ally, though her views were never as rancorous as his. Her lacklustre campus novel, An Academic Question, with its depressed ...”

“... on her work as worthy of parody – not just recognisable, but recognised. When Thomas Hardy, John Masefield and Walter de la Mare secured her a civil list pension in 1923, Mew couldn’t decide whether it was more ‘like a dream or a nightmare’. Such diffidence also contained defiance. Her public readings were bracing affairs – ‘like having ...”

“... were not a product of the American distraction factories, but originated in Manchester in 1889. John Tiller, cotton trader by day and musical impresario by night, had noticed that the effect of chorus dancers was marred by lack of discipline and, we must suppose, solved the problem by applying proto-Taylorian Mancunian production techniques. Everyone from ...”

“... and class favouritism that were levelled against North, Pitt, Sidmouth and Wellington, as well as John Major, Neil Hamilton and Alan B’Stard, and that did most to destroy the Tory regime in 1830 and again in 1997.The new trade border in the Irish Sea may well prove difficult to remove, especially since the government seems reluctant to admit to it, and ...”

“... 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 ...”