“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”