“... woman of ‘tempered complexion’. This last food was advertised as a favourite of the elderly John Caius of Cambridge, who offered vivid proof that you are who you eat: Caius was made ‘so peevish and so full of frets when he suckt one woman froward of condition and of bad diet; and contrariwise so quiet and well, when he suckt another of contrary ...”

“... Islam after leaving Khartoum University and joined the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, led by John Garang. Nothing could be further from the Islamist doctrines Bolad had once championed – and nothing more inimical to them – than the ideology of the SPLA. Although Garang is a Southerner and many in his movement urge a separate state for southern ...”

“... way of saying "not yet” to somebody else.’ To illustrate what he means, he turns to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and On Representative Government – ‘both of which,’ Chakrabarty says, ‘proclaimed self-rule as the highest form of government and yet argued against giving Indians or Africans self-rule.’ According to Mill, Indians or ...”

“... Party, who would presumably now give anything to have lost the 1992 election, rescuing them from John Major, Black Wednesday, and the ratification of Maastricht in one fell swoop). If Labour get back next time with a majority of, say, only twenty, it will for the most part be the loyalists who are gone (those who won their seats on Tony’s coat-tails in ...”

“... There’s no question that O’Connor was doing the latter. Gooch reports that when the poet John Crowe Ransom selected one of her stories to read aloud in Iowa, he substituted the word ‘negro’ for the slur. O’Connor complained that he’d ruined the story. ‘The people I was writing about would never use any other word.’That O’Connor had a ...”

“... say, Hugo Ball, the Zurich Dadaist who was in close dialogue with Schmitt in the early 1920s, or John Heartfield, the Berlin Dadaist whose photo-text montages directly confronted the Nazis in the early 1930s? Why Kentridge and not, say, Hans Haacke, the Heartfield of our own besieged time, or Thomas Hirschhorn, whose excessive installations mimic emergency ...”

“... to him, Rowland had stopped all Lonrho advertising going to the Observer because of criticism by John Davies, the City Editor, over the Lonrho-House of Fraser negotiations. Conor Cruise O’Brien was characteristically frank in writing in his column for the paper that it would be absurd for anybody to suppose that he would feel he could write as freely about ...”

“... In Elizabeth Taylor’s novel The Wedding Group, published in 1968, there is a grand old painter called Harry Bretton. He is modelled, I would guess, on Eric Gill, for the Life, and Stanley Spencer, for the Work. Musing by the studio window, he considers his place in history: Turner was the greatest English painter, and was safely dead, did not encroach or suggest comparisons ...”

“... being serious when Cunningham doesn’t care for the sufferer. He writes of the anthropologist John Layard, who had been psychoanalysed by Homer Lane in an attempt to overcome a nervous breakdown so severe that it at first caused physical paralysis: ‘annoyed by Auden’s refusal to love him and by Lane’s dying half-way through his analysis, Layard shot ...”

“... sense of the unapproachability of the future. The other book I adduce from that time and place is John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, which contains a man’s companion sense of the event of the future, or of its non-event. He characterises his state exactly as a despair over the exhaustion of possibilities – a state in which he broods over the fact that ...”

“... names and now meaningless events: Yesterday I introduced James to Mrs Inman; – in the evening John Bridges returned from Goodnestone – and this morn before we had left the Breakfast Table we had a visit from Mr Whitfield, whose object I imagine was principally to thank my Eldest Brother for his assistance. Poor Man! – he has now a little intermission ...”

“... equilibrium’ – an aesthetically interested revision of the ‘reflective equilibrium’ of John Rawls, which puts to work the pleasures and pains that come from imaginative sympathy and not just those that come from social information. The equilibrium is finally achieved when, the sympathetic reading finished, the spectator can assess ‘from her own ...”

“... event in Keats’s short life, I recommend Amy Clampitt’s musing sequence, ‘Voyages: Homage to John Keats’ (included in What the Light Was Like, and in her recently published Collected Poems). But then Clampitt’s poem is not focused on race, class, gender, or the hunger for ‘success’, buton Keats’s imaginative and intellectual integrations of ...”

“... And that is what happened, though not before, in an act of frivolity that simply beggars belief, John Major, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, had taken sterling into the European exchange-rate system. By the summer of 1992, the German Discount Rate was at a historic peak of 8.75 per cent and Britain was in a recession of astonishing savagery. Sensing there ...”

“... who cared greatly about her blonde, pink and sometimes overweight appearance – was pleased when John Holms told her she looked like ‘a something Queen Elizabeth’. The missing adjective was ‘Surbiton’, which she would not have liked, though she was capable of accepting far crueller truths about herself than most people could dream up for her. She ...”