“... Office agitated for foreign-language broadcasts to counter the propaganda of the Axis powers. John Reith, the director general, felt obliged to accept an arrangement that, as Potter puts it, ‘included agreeing that news editors would accept specific guidance from civil servants as to which items needed to be included in, or omitted from, different ...”

“... and has the ninth largest economy – who grew up not just working-class but poor. His biographer John French points out that Lula learned to read when he was ten, didn’t always have enough to eat, left school at twelve, and came from the impoverished, stigmatised north-east of the country, with the accent to prove it. Class and regional identification were ...”

“... a police raid. (She had taken part in the kidnapping of the American ambassador to Guatemala, John Gordon Mein, who was killed while trying to escape.) Kaminsky was disgusted by extreme left-wing groups like the Red Army Faction and their ‘bloody methods of urban guerrilla warfare’. He had also concluded that French security forces were following ...”

“... father handed them over: two small, cheap, reddish diaries, for 1933 and 1934, both published by John Walker & Co, Farringdon House, Warwick Lane, EC4, filled with very small writing, and decorated at weekly intervals with coloured stamps he stuck in to mark the Church calendar. These left him even less space to write down the compromising details of his ...”

“... sergeant major is a can of McEwens lager.10 March. The Independent pursues its campaign against John Birt over his tax arrangements. On another page it boasts its acquisition of Jim Slater as its Stock Exchange commentator.13 March. To Weston to see Mam, who is dulleyed, expressionless, absent. The sun is hot through the blinds and the radio full ...”

“... back to the academics’. Despite some scoring against the ‘academic’ character of poets like John Ashbery (whose work is described as the ‘epitome’ of the academic in a derogatory phrase which oddly echoes the celebrative description of the footnote as the ‘epitome’ of Pound’s work), McGann has so thoroughly assimilated the phenomenon to his ...”

“... an aggressive recruitment drive, it was far more successful in signing up the leaders, such as John Gonomo, the new president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), and Moses Mayekiso, the metalworkers’ leader, than in acquiring real grass-roots strength. To be sure, young ‘comrades’ can always be found to wave the flag and shout ...”

“... 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 ...”