“... to the university to get a degree. Storey wonders if he might not have absorbed the teaching of John Ruskin, who had urged undergraduates to chivalric derring-do in the waste spaces of the earth. But he arrived too late to hear Ruskin’s famous lecture on the ‘imperial duty’ of founding colonies and the evidence for Ruskin’s impact on his thinking is ...”

“... arrived during the controversy around the censorship, arrest and expulsion from Parliament of John Wilkes. The twin spectacles of political corruption and popular dissent during the Wilkes affair inspired Marat to embark on a frenzied study of the English commonwealth tradition, resulting in the publication in 1774 of The Chains of Slavery: A Work wherein ...”

“... the ambiguities and resorts to conventional wisdom. His list of leaders includes Harry Truman and John Kennedy – two presidents who risked war by exacerbating tensions with the Soviet Union. Dallek views FDR from the perspective of a mid-century liberal who has apparently made his peace with the warfare state. As Dallek sees him, FDR, like his cousin ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a woman to redeem her sexual transgression has. In Much Ado about Nothing, Claudio is told by Don John on the eve of his wedding that Hero has been unfaithful to him: ‘It would better fit your honour to change your mind.’ Wrongly accused at the ceremony, Hero faints to the ground, apparently dead. When she revives, her father, Leonato, exclaims: Do not ...”

“... and they were numerous, included both Fitzgeralds, the New York society hostess Muriel Draper, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Nancy Mitford, Dawn Powell, even Mary McCarthy, whose rivalrousness towards other intellectual women is legendary. The fact that Murphy seems to have been one of the kindliest people on earth no doubt only magnified her ...”

“... years and to deploy 6000 National Guard along the length of the frontier. The bill is sponsored by John McCain (Arizona), who, like George W. Bush, was once an immigration liberal but sees where the votes have come to lie in recent years. Two highly visible protagonists in the immigration drama, Salvador Reza and the Republican state senator, Russell ...”

“... the avoidance of which came to be both liberalism’s central aim and its chief selling point. For John Rawls, the most influential exponent of postwar liberalism, Freudianism, like Marxism, ‘destroys the game of reasoning’ by reducing ‘men’s opinions’ to hidden causes, whether repressed wishes or material interests.* In an unpublished paper from ...”

“... in Scotland) and the second with one favoured by Uruguay (made in England). The Belgian referee, John Langenus (who, Wilson somehow resists adding, had failed his first refereeing exam when unable to answer the question ‘What is the correct procedure if the ball strikes a low-flying plane?’), was so concerned for his own safety that he arranged a ...”

“... of human life without God as a witness is what drives the novel.The story begins in Vietnam, where John Converse, a former boy-wonder playwright – one play, nothing since – is a war tourist passing through, much in the exploratory mood of Stone himself. Converse is working on a plan to make a fortune with one risky venture – shipping a backpack of cheap ...”

“... music (his characters have a particular taste for Mahler and for the Elizabethan composer John Dowland). In 1947 the awkward young man with literary ambitions moved into a flat with other young littérateurs, including the future avant-garde poets Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. He also took a job in a record store, where he met his first wife (they ...”

“... permanently deadened the capacity for irony among those who took credit for the triumph. Power, as John Adams wrote in a passage Niebuhr cites, always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambitions, avarice, love and ...”

“... and inarticulate as well as the all too fluent opinion-formers, of the Singing Postman as well as John Lennon’. The emphasis here is firmly on the first term of each antithesis, a bias that prefigures the structure of the books which follow. For though Kynaston’s avowed intent is, as far as possible, to let history speak for itself (‘humbly recording ...”

“... up the steeply banked terraces. But noble as the site appears, it is not entirely benign. The poet John Lucas, in 92 Acharnon Street, reminds us that the old Olympic stadium is where ‘the Colonels assembled schoolchildren for parades so that they might learn to salute the Greek flag.’ Across a never relenting stream of traffic, motorbikes cascading from ...”

“... sampler of the high life. In both roles he fitted right in: he was, in his own words, John Bunyan’s ‘Mr Facing-both-ways’. He is intensely, almost insanely sociable. He discovered at an early age that being able to perform as a public speaker meant that ‘you need never dine or sleep alone.’ Early on, he mainly chose to sleep with boys ...”