“... in the basement of the Architectural Press, the paintings of David Jones and Eric Ravilious, and John Minton’s decorations for the cookery books of Elizabeth David. Only in the coolest hardware shops or the deepest Habitat basements can one believe that the purpose of kitchen design is functional. In the history of taste, painting is only occasionally ...”

“... made even more significant by the fact that it carries a 20-page introduction specially written by John Bayley. The author of the most distinguished book on Pushkin in any language, Bayley here gives the essence of his thoughts on Pushkin in general and Eugene Onegin in particular. Bayley’s book has always been the best full-length introduction to ...”

“... inequality of wealth, speak of the same world as Peterley’s but seen from the opposite angle,’ John Wain has written. ‘There is no evidence that Peterley worries about social injustice, or thinks about it at all, for that matter.’ With whatever undertow of self-disapproval, Richard Pennington rises from an inferior social position through the phantom ...”

“... in fact, alone; she may even be seen as the last in a recognisable English literary tradition. John Keats was the first great English poet to grow up in the London suburbs, and – aided by Leigh Hunt – to allow his work to speak for his true milieu. Browning’s aesthetic eccentricity might well be called suburbanity, the decision to keep his ...”

“... creative impulse), it was not out of the desire to register the world around him. His friend John le Gay Brereton could see the importance of Henry Lawson. Brennan couldn’t. He had no interest in the bush, the Labour movement or Australian nationalism. In the Australian Nineties, a period which self-consciously but justifiably felt itself to be alive ...”

“... by such luminaries of the conservative movement as Congressman Larry McDonald (head of the John Birch Society), Fred and Phyllis Schafly, Ray Cline (former deputy-director of the CIA), General Daniel Graham (now leader of the High Frontier – i.e. Star Wars – lobby) and Reed Irvine. Irvine brought a fresh raft of influential supporters into the ...”

“... seemed to understand it, as it were, from the outside. When one of the Martians, the mathematician John von Neumann, was appointed to the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study at the age of 29, a story went around that he was ‘a demigod but had made a thorough, detailed study of human beings and could imitate them perfectly’. In Britain and America, the ...”

“... Suffering from depression, he was analysed by the perceptive but corrupt psychotherapist John Layard, who went to bed with him; his father paid for the analysis, and Layard, when Redgrove explained the Game to him, said simply: ‘That’s your mother.’ With its epitaph from Baudelaire – ‘C’est elle! Noire et pourtant ...”

“... house. Half a century later prints of pastoral subjects after Stubbs and pastel portraits by John Russell became collectors’ items, as did, soon after, quaint 17th-century samplers and, in due course, Chinese paintings made for export. The ‘surprising and surprised birds’ may even have been plates by Audubon, whose work was then regarded primarily ...”

“... This outburst meant Williams was docked a point, which cost her the match. The crowd went crazy. John McEnroe commentating on television, agreed: ‘You can’t call that there. Not at that point in the match.’ So it turns out it didn’t matter that the line judge was fucking right; she was still run out of town. As Moskowitz and Wertheim show, most ...”

“... up your partner’s adulation of the genius he or she is sleeping with.) As sensitive a reader as John Updike, in a dismissive review of Mortals that dwelled on his irritation with the involved character of Ray Finch’s thoughts, seemed not to notice either the novel’s mockery of Ray or the smaller but considerable element of self-mockery in the very tone ...”

“... On​ 17 September 1862, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, aged 34, gave his diaries of the last 15 years to Sophia Andreevna Behrs, who had just turned 18. She was the second of three daughters and her mother had been Lev’s childhood friend. Three days earlier, on 14 September, Lev had proposed to Sonya by hand-delivered letter, when her parents had been expecting him to propose to their eldest, Liza, who was twenty ...”

“... or master has been replaced with the terrifying implacability of a row of figures. ‘I’m sorry, John, your numbers aren’t good enough, we’ll have to let you go.’ The metric fixation is an attempt to extend that mechanism to activities that cannot be reduced to the equivalent of sales figures. No matter that you may have been a deeply loving partner in ...”

“... of its offices: ‘At this location, 122 Commerce Street, was a very large warehouse owned by John Murphey, who provided support to the slave traders in the city.’ ‘I would have preferred not to have the additional markers,’ the mayor confessed, ‘but I believe they are part of history.’ He agreed to allow them, he said, because they would ...”

“... discussions I moderated at the BBC brought together two master spin doctors: Alastair Campbell and John Nagenda, who managed the media for President Museveni in Uganda. Much of the programme dealt with the techniques used by British officials – some of them former BBC employees – such as timing the release of information to control the news agenda, or ...”