“... a thousand people stood outside in the street to see her. She was introduced by the philosopher John Dewey. ‘The development at which I aim includes the whole child,’ she said. ‘My larger aim is the eventual perfection of the human race.’In America, Montessori’s authoritarian tendencies were even more evident than they had been in Italy. She ...”

“... work of an obscure photographer she had discovered in Paris (Atget), Ralph Steiner, Paul Grotz, John Cheever, Ben Shahn and, most important of all, Lincoln Kirstein.Evans always acknowledged the role luck played in his life, and nothing could have been luckier than the friendship he formed with Kirstein, whose influence on his career was so profound that ...”

“... Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, in an episode where the knight Astolfo is brought to the moon by St John the Evangelist; they travel in Elijah’s chariot. Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata includes a scene closely modelled on the ‘Somnium’. Paradise Lost is full of journeys up and views down; its closest imitation of the classical view from above comes near ...”

“... who have kicked over the traces and made good Down South. The novelist and ex-Bingley librarian John Braine of Room at the Top fame will later come into the same category.The only writer she does read with any regularity, though, has nothing to do with the North at all. This is Beverley Nichols, of whose column in Woman’s Own she is a devoted fan, and ...”

“... is the closest thing we have to a national industry. King Charles is a private landlord. John Lewis is a private landlord. The homelessness charity St Mungo’s is a private landlord. So are many MPs and, as Ruby found out, doctors.Landlordism has proliferated in tandem with soaring land and property values. A fifth of British homes are currently ...”

“... with another dog, Emily waded in at once while ‘several other animals,’ the Haworth stationer John Greenwood reported, ‘who thought themselves men, were standing looking on like cowards as they were.’ She forced the dogs apart, ‘dredg[ing] well their noses with pepper’ and sent them packing. When Branwell drunkenly set light to his ...”

“... and West Point are not useful frames of reference. Reviewing Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill, John Updike singled out a particular detail as seeming to be ‘miraculously recovered’ from the past – the pink dimple left in the flesh of a man’s neck by the collar stud he has been wearing. Chatwin was reaching back a couple of generations. Enrigue ...”

“... a point. It was across from what would become the new St Patrick’s Cathedral. The archbishop, John Joseph Hughes, had intended to buy the land for his own residence but was outbid by Restell – payback for his denunciation of her from the pulpit. In revenge, Wright says, she built ‘a house so ostentatious that parishioners at St Patrick’s would be ...”

“... it is never who the stout man is, just one of his enduring, and maybe endearing, properties. John Stuart Mill, the progenitor of the doctrine of natural kinds, left us a good way to distinguish the two. Giving horse and phosphorus as examples, he argued that there are endless characteristics associated with some classifications; thus horses (and ...”

“... of Linear Elamite. Afterwards, the keeper of the Middle East department at the British Museum, John Curtis, mentioned that he knew the Mahboubian family and could make an introduction. It took four years of cajoling but eventually the family agreed to withdraw the silver vessels from a safe deposit box for Desset to examine.Desset is adamant that without ...”

“... then again begin,With tremulous cadence slow, and bringThe eternal note of sadness in.That is what John Masefield called ODTAA, an acronym for ‘one damn thing after another’, and the title of his 1926 novel, which really does what it says on the tin. It’s a long tale of futile adventures in the jungle, ‘event after event’, as Masefield says, which ...”

“... including Pompeo Batoni and Anton Raphael Mengs. She met and formed a lasting friendship with John Soane, but it was Henry Fuseli whose ‘extraordinary visions struck my fancy’. He inspired some of the best of her later work. Without her father, however, the family business did not flourish and her mother, of whom nobody, including Maria, seems to have ...”

“... He wasn’t able to give any further details of the incident. The solicitor for the defendants, John Turner, puts the blame on the investigating team: ‘Evidence that tended to disprove what had happened was pushed to one side, evidence that seemed to fit was gleefully seized on. And every time there was a negative, it was twisted. Normally, if there’s ...”

“... punishment in the United States subsists – inescapably – in a miasma of race. The Honorable John H. Land in 1977 presided over the trial of a black man called William Brooks, whose case McFeely follows. Land is the son of a prominent local dignitary who had seen to the lynching of an adolescent boy 65 years earlier. The barefoot ‘little black ...”

“... hostility to the Community. She was still strong enough to ensure that her favoured successor, John Major, took over, but it soon became clear that he had no more intention than Lawson or Howe of hewing to her vision of Europe. With scarcely over a year in office behind him, Major signed the Treaty of Maastricht, after negotiating an opt-out from the ...”