“... 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 ...”

“... world. One judgment about Lewis bound to cause offence was voiced by his admirer and former pupil John Wain, who observed in 1964 that ‘his writing improves as it gets further from the popular and demagogic.’ That latter adjective may sound harsh and inexact, but on occasion in his apologetics it does seem as though Lewis wrote to please the crowd ...”

“... a Bothy Nicht at the Imperial Hotel in Aberdeen where he heard the ballad singing and stories of John Strachan, an Aberdeenshire farmer who became one of his most important sources. In ‘Journey to a Kingdom’, an unpublished poem written in 1938, Henderson leaves no doubt that these northern excursions were conscious acts of homecoming. In the summer of ...”

“... Heaney, who were both a few years ahead of him at St Columb’s Catholic Grammar School (where John Hume and Brian Friel had also been pupils), he belonged to the first generation to have access to free secondary schooling after the war. He went to university at Queen’s in Belfast, spent time in London, and by the mid-1960s was back in Derry, fired up by ...”

“... tones, while falling far short of withdrawing their support for Trump. Listening to Paul Ryan, John McCain, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Orrin Hatch inveigh against the evil of white supremacy, you might have thought they’d just dusted off their copies of Between the World and Me. They can hardly claim to have been shocked by Trump’s response, however. As ...”

“... notice she wished to avert.’ This comes from Johnston’s charming memoir of the art historians John Fleming and Hugh Honour, published last year.* They too were part of the Lubbock household; their own memory of Origo’s visits was summed up in a sentence: ‘Then this icicle appeared and the whole house pulled itself together.’ Thirty years after her ...”

“... cows, hawking bread in the streets, scaring birds, bookkeeping for the parish overseer. Like John Clare, who escaped to the woods to read ‘Sixpenny Romances’ as a child, he loved books and hid them from stern elders who equated reading with laziness. Unlike Clare, he got money for books from stealing and used to squirrel away halfpence when he was ...”

“... best stories come in Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron by the adventurer Edward John Trelawny, and so are a bit too good to be quite true, but they are evidence of the way Shelley came across. Trelawny’s account of Shelley’s attempt to learn how to swim in a deep pool in the Arno catches the thing very well:He doffed his jacket and ...”

“... the programme was as a colossal problem-solving machine. The first problem was the one John Kennedy presented to Nasa in May 1961 when he said that there would be an American on the moon before the end of the decade. Was that even possible? As​ Roger Launius, a former official historian of Nasa, explains in Reaching for the Moon, Kennedy was ...”

“... and the Lambeth riverside that was destroyed by the Albert Embankment, for instance. In the 1870s John Thomson’s portraits of street people in his monthly magazine, Street Life in London, also recorded worlds and social customs that were fast disappearing. Working alongside the socialist journalist Adolphe Smith, Thomson humanises and even heroicises his ...”