“... a life, even one of a king who believed he sat on God’s throne and wielded his sceptre. John Donne, whom James I appointed as dean of St Paul’s, wrote: ‘A glass is not the less brittle, because a king’s face is represented in it; nor a king the less brittle, because God is represented in ...”

“... of Sherlock Holmes’s dog not barking. He examines in mordant detail one grandiose exception, John Wayne’s Green Berets, a glorification of those heroes with the aging director himself as colonel, which made large profits and aroused loud student protest. Its dishonesty, at a date when so much evidence about the true nature of the war had ...”

“... before the later work comes to seem as much about history as histrionics. When his publisher John Murray tried to clean up Don Juan in the interests of religion and propriety, Byron roared from Italy: ‘You sha’n’t make Canticles of my Cantos.’ But it was not just religious scruples at work: it was a growing cult of the dignity of Art. Byron ...”

“... often convincingly, to Shaw’s need to wish away the intrusion into Shaw’s infancy of George John Vandaleur Lee – or, rather, the intrusion of the suspicion that Lee had been the lover of Shaw’s mother and was, perhaps, Shaw’s real father. In the teacher-pupil (or sculptor-statue) relation of Higgins to Eliza Doolittle, Mr Silver persuasively sees ...”

“... author’s list of hostile quotations extends from St Paul, of course, to, rather surprisingly, John Paul II, with a side swipe at the father figures of Marxism. It is, he claims, only after a reformist group, whether based on church or on state, has been defeated by the resistance of the family and its resolute, ‘selfish’ adherence to its own values ...”

“... to react in a particular way to political issues. In 1841, Jews were encouraged to vote for Lord John Russell (a Whig) because he was in favour of Jewish Emancipation – he won by nine votes. The Jewish vote, clearly, could be mobilised and put to good use. The Liberals put up five Jewish candidates at the next election, including David Salomons (who had ...”

“... Mack Smith writes. (One should not forget, however, that other great European liberals, including John Stuart Mill, had profound misgivings about pure democratic government.) It was the liberal leader Giovanni Giolitti who tried gradually to open up politics to wider circles of the population in the last years of the 19th century and the first two decades of ...”

“... for questions. The tale of Hylas, for instance, is one of the better-known episodes, thanks to John William Waterhouse’s painting with its loved-up, spaced-out nymphs. Casually, Apollonius drops a bombshell: Hercules had adopted the boy, he says, after killing his father. He alludes to some dispute over an ox, but has no time to explain: ‘these tales ...”

“... they could not have failed to be true. Undeserved suffering does not merely happen to be bad.When John Leslie defends the Axiarchic View, he appeals to this kind of non-logical necessity. Not only does value rule reality, Leslie suggests, it could not have failed to rule. But this suggestion is hard to believe. While it is inconceivable that undeserved ...”

“... in hideously pornographic detail,’ he comments on one particularly virulent racist fantasy from John Bull, about the consequences of slave emancipation in the Colonies. And he does, at a length of nearly a thousand words (more than two full pages of indented quotation). The same chapter contains a hundred other quotations of almost equally nauseating ...”

“... of ‘Notes towards ... ’, on disarming criticism by pre-emptive apology. But in the words of John Wayne, ‘Sorry doesn’t get it done.’ Thus he writes, ‘(This really has the makings of a Mills & Boon)’ – but lets it stand. He inserts a footnote in a scene between Philip and his rival for Melissa: ‘It is difficult to render simultaneity in ...”

“... now rarely viewed as anything but positive. In the era of rock and roll and of Philip Glass and John Adams, it seems normal and desirable for music to aspire to be a narcotic. We live in the time of the triumph of the ‘theatrocracy’ that Nietzsche deplored, in which we can find many descendants of Wagner’s favourite dramatic form, the pseudo-spiritual ...”

“... to the streets of Whitechapel as Sinclair knew them in the Seventies. Up from the river comes John Gull, an early 19th-century Essex wharfinger who soon succumbs to cholera. Adopted by a parson and educated as a doctor, his son William turns up at Guy’s Hospital playing hand to the mind of James Hinton – a surgeon in whose philosophy the Ripper’s ...”

“... Managers and workers jointly resist any attempt from above to extract more effort from them. John Hicks’s dictum that ‘the greatest of all monopoly profits is a quiet life’ may be particularly apt here. Relations between the state enterprise and its immediate political superiors exhibit similar complexity. There is clientelism, in that the ...”

“... of myself as a mental self, my feeling is that I am continually new. In his autobiography, John Updike writes: ‘I have the persistent sensation, in my life ... that I am just beginning.’ This seems exactly right. The experience of the ‘I’ as in some sense new each time is (I suggest) fundamental and universally available, although it is ...”