“... One of John Cheever’s most famous stories is called ‘The Swimmer’. It is set, like much of his fiction, in the lawned suburbs somewhere outside New York City, and it is filled, like most of his fiction, with despair. The hero, Neddy Merrill, the father of four daughters, is sitting by a neighbour’s pool drinking gin when the idea comes to him that he might reach home by doing a lap of all of his neighbours’ pools on the way ...”

“... for Israel, reputedly ‘good’ with black people, he is moreover young and once shook hands with John F. Kennedy. At the bar of the Sheraton Wayfarer in Manchester, the HQ of the travelling press corps, most correspondents report that their editors only want good news about the new consensus candidate. And, generally, that’s what they have been getting and ...”

“... girly-boy who hymned his cheap-suit backstreet bohemia over blackout power chords – as Smith’s John the Baptist. Horses betrays a love of early Kinks, Them, Who, but reframes their riffy aesthetic with studied artfulness. How much credit should go to the producer, John Cale, isn’t clear. Smith never sounded this ...”

“... caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring himself to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking ...”

“... by this point driven almost mad by its antagonism towards Europe and its commensurate contempt for John Major – refused to endorse a party and instead chose to support whichever candidate was the most Eurosceptic in each constituency. The result was that the Times encouraged its readers to vote for Jeremy Corbyn in Islington. For much of its history it had ...”

“... 1568, stated plainly by Chief Justice Dyer on behalf of the Court of Common Pleas. The redoubtable John Lilburne, at his trial for high treason in 1649, said to the court: ‘By the laws of England I am not to answer questions against or concerning my selfe,’ and Justice Keble reassured him: ‘You shall not be compeld.’ Dalton’s Countrey Justice in 1618 ...”

“... thrown off the project, which was eventually built to a design by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Whatever its programmatic ‘complexity and contradiction’, as Venturi would put it, the Sainsbury Wing ‘looked’ to the casual eye like just another part of Trafalgar Square, all Corinthian columns and Portland stone. ABK never recovered, and neither ...”

“... on the gramophone) and places I couldn’t visit (the house in St Luke’s Road with a brown plaque in memory of W.H. Hudson) because they either reminded me of her and therefore of death or of death and therefore of her. I kept on telling myself: ‘I mustn’t be rushed.’ Somehow or other, the friends had to be warned off, kept at bay. I ...”

“... racialised and gendered histories. We have seen only modest increases in the number of Black, brown and gender non-conforming people among teaching staff. For the most part our intellectual existence remains siloed, with each field of knowledge having its own vocabulary and organised into a discrete ontological formation. In Silencing the Past: Power and ...”

“... hostility to the Community. She was still strong enough to ensure that her favoured successor, John Major, took over, but it soon became clear that he had no more intention than Lawson or Howe of hewing to her vision of Europe. With scarcely over a year in office behind him, Major signed the Treaty of Maastricht, after negotiating an opt-out from the ...”

“... 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 Labour could win majorities on its own after all. Inequality continued to climb on his and Brown’s watch. The banking crisis, which Labour failed to foresee and, arguably, helped facilitate, provided the excuse for Tory austerity, itself an excuse for dismantling the state. And, as Geoffrey Evans and James Tilley argue in their formidably ...”

“... before telling me I was the latest visitor in a tradition of literary visitors stretching back to John Milton. He said it very kindly, but I wanted to laugh. However, something high in his red cheeks warned me neither to laugh nor to make any reference to Paradise Lost. I simply smiled and composed my wits and followed him over the black and claret tiles to ...”

“... habit of infidelity and eventually left his wife for good in 1901, when Lewis was 18; and Augustus John, his celebrated predecessor at the Slade, whom he sought assiduously to emulate, and whose ever-varying seraglio became an object of fascination. But Lewis’s presentation of himself to women, and to the men with whom he conferred about women, had a ...”

“... crescent of Michael Searles’s Paragon – and while Dulwich is less monumental, it does have John Soane’s Picture Gallery and the buildings of Dulwich College, ranging from mannered Georgian to Barry’s lurid neo-Gothic, with the remnants of the Crystal Palace nearby and the bizarre tower of Charles Townsend’s Horniman Museum overlooking it ...”