“... to learn a long time before, at the hands (or the beards) of the Great Victorians. The narrator, John Dowell, effaces himself to the point of colluding with, or ignoring, or not even noticing, his wife’s seduction by his best friend, Edward Ashburnham, the perfect English gentleman. Dowell (Do-Well?) observes that he has had 12 years of ‘playing the ...”

“... auction, as expected, was the Jean Louis sheath dress, covered in tiny stones, worn by Marilyn at John Kennedy’s birthday tribute in 1962, when she sang ‘Happy Birthday’. This went for over a million dollars. The man who bought it (owner of a memorabilia shop called Ripley’s Believe It or Not) thought he’d got a great bargain. The Kennedy dress ...”

“... The Salsette, a P&O steamship of 6000 tons, was torpedoed and sunk by a U-boat on 20 July 1917. John Liddiard, a British diver forever in search of a new discovery, says that the Salsette is ‘the Mecca of South Coast wreck-diving. Ask any Weymouth skipper and it seems that just about every charter group wants to dive this one.’ Robert Louis ...”

“... was a tough-minded drive to find mechanical explanations. When England’s greatest living poet, John Milton, wanted to explain why we are as we are, he retold the ancient story of Adam’s sin and consequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden. When Alexander Pope wrote his Essay on Man in the following century he took care to parallel his work with ...”

“... the 21st-century editorial tradition by falling back on Johnsonian common sense and gratitude to John Hemings and Henry Condell for their extraordinary work in making Shakespeare available ‘to the great variety of readers’ in a text that keeps his plays anchored in the place from which they came and where they continue to be most alive: the ...”

“... was homosexual.’ Thirty years later, when Eliot’s prestige and influence were at their zenith, John Peter, a Canadian academic, published an article in Essays in Criticism called ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land’. Peter argued that the poem was at heart an elegy that might be compared to Tennyson’s In Memoriam: ‘At some previous time the ...”

“... nuclear deterrent), were thought to be unpopular, and its changes were accepted by John Smith when he succeeded Kinnock as leader after the 1992 election. Smith was not a member of the soft left, however; nor did he anticipate New Labour. The party he led was still recognisably in the British social-democratic tradition; still one in which the ...”

“... to have reached agreement on some basic questions of what the Thesaurus was supposed to achieve. John Boardman’s introduction claims it is a ‘comprehensive guide’ but he admits that while some of the collections of evidence are nearly complete, ‘in many cases they are highly selective’. There seems to have been not nearly enough cracking of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... add thorough explanatory notes, keeping their sources in clear view. (One source, remarkably, is John Thirlwall’s copy of Williams’s 1951 Collected, in which the poet himself made explanatory notes.) The present collection rightly keeps the mixed poems-and-prose of Spring and All and The Descent of Winter together as books. It’s almost a shame that ...”

“... him with Basil Fawlty. Except that the dying Dennis Potter went further, maybe, when he called John Birt, the BBC’s then director-general, ‘a croak-voiced Dalek’ in 1993. Much expectation surrounded Doctor Who’s return last year, into an industry that has changed vastly since he went away. Mark Thompson, the BBC’s current director-general, sees ...”

“... only a few hundred votes. The Fascist candidate at Hythe in 1939, Kim Philby’s father Harry St John Philby, received only 578 votes. After the war, the Union Movement suffered much the same fate, campaigning largely against immigration. In his last contest, at Shoreditch in the 1966 general election, Mosley himself secured only 1127 votes (4.6 per ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... community needed to be ‘100 per cent happy’ with the content, but in the same message to John Scarlett, the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, he made clear that ‘the judgment as to whether a single person should be appointed to write the final version’ had yet to be made.20 On his best behaviour, Scarlett made a final seizure of control ...”

“... 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 ...”