“... of total immersion as practised by the Baptists, according to their conception of the methods of John the Baptist. She could not join without that, and the river, of course, was frozen over. She would have to wait until the ice went out. She does, but the immersion kills her. ‘The Baptism’ is an uncharacteristically bitter story, a settling of scores ...”

“... supremacy where it belonged, with the ‘richer classes’. In an age which saw Ruskin calling John Stuart Mill a ‘loathsome cretin’ we needn’t be surprised that Harrison was also capable of strong language. When Joseph Chamberlain was said to have hurt his ankle in 1906, Harrison prayed ‘for the sake of our poor dear country’ that the trouble ...”

“... her siblings’ madness. Harold was less enthusiastic. He had his own nightmares – one starred John Galsworthy ‘belabouring’ him with a huge steak – and his own sexual problems: he climbed into bed on his wedding night grunting ‘Come here, boy.’ He may have been disturbed by Mew’s quaintness; he certainly found her difficult. When he published ...”

“... he was happy and fruitful in Manchester and felt especially loyal to the Vice-Chancellor, Sir John Stopford (who, I add from personal knowledge, was also one of the nicest men known to science). Although as a school of organic chemistry Cambridge was at that time ‘virtually nonexistent’, it had possibilities, and after securing some administrative ...”

“... cannot be justified. This liberal argument from the worst possible case was advanced long since by John Stuart Mill. It affords insufficient comfort to most contemporary feminists, many of whom want an answer to the theoretical questions about the relative potentialities of the two sexes, and provides no guidance to those feminists and others who think that ...”

“... but even here his illuminating suggestions must be weighed against the distinguished essay by John Creaser in the Lindley volume which points, heretically and convincingly, to the ‘royalism’ of Comus, or at least of the occasion for which it was written. The radicals were apparently against ‘authoritarianism’ – but who was more authoritarian ...”

“... was guaranteed to increase its underground following. It was Ginsberg’s old Columbia colleagues, John Hollander, Norman Podhoretz and Louis Simpson, all cutting their teeth in the New York literary scene under the approving auspices of Lionel and Diana Trilling, who led the charge against the Beats. ‘It is only fair to Allen Ginsberg to remark on the utter ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... pleasures was ‘taking the salute of other soldiers’. According to the entry for Faulkner in John Sutherland’s brilliantly entertaining Lives of the Novelists, Faulkner probably never took to the air.4 ‘What comes to mind,’ Sutherland writes, ‘is the raving George IV on his deathbed, convinced he had fought gallantly at the Battle of Waterloo ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Martin Edwards ultimately made £93 million selling his Manchester United shares bit by bit. Sir John Hall and his family made £75 million when they did the same with their stake in Newcastle United. Arsenal’s shareholders, including descendants of upper-class gents who held the shares from the 1920s and had never taken a penny out, banked £300 million ...”

“... with the publication in 2003 of its magisterial sixth volume, written by the general editor, John Baker, and covering the years 1483-1558. It then went back to the beginning, with R.H. Helmholz’s opening volume on early canon law. The rest was silence, until in 2010 the series sailed suddenly and magnificently into port without any of the remaining ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... architects is essentially a list (Meades likes lists) of refined barbarians. The pantheon contains John Vanbrugh, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, S.S. Teulon, William Butterfield, Frederick Pilkington, Dominikus and Gottfried Böhm, Claude Parent, Rodney Gordon, Richard Rogers (in his Gothic moods), Zaha Hadid. Sometimes, as with the Communist emulator of the style of ...”

“... 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 ...”