“... material of the book could just as well have formed the basis of a very different sort of work. John Betjeman picked up on this odd and wholly characteristic ambivalence when he wrote to congratulate him: ‘When I read the book it seemed to me so rockingly funny that nothing else would seem funny again.’Decline and Fall is one of a number of Waugh’s ...”

“... than just an academic dispute about scraps of paper in the archives,’ the Anglo-German historian John Röhl wrote in 2015. ‘It marked the point at which civil society in the Federal Republic admirably turned its back on a difficult past to embrace Western values and share its destiny with that of its neighbours. The transformation was profound and ...”

“... separated from the southern Catholic Netherlands, still governed by Spain, first in the person of John of Austria. By the end of the century, the ever more numerous Dutch soldiers came to be quartered in northern towns and villages, and it was their prerogative to plunder the countryside. A squad under an officer might emerge from town to waylay a rich convoy ...”

“... have led Hizbullah to retreat to the Litani river. As the US national security spokesman John Kirby pointed out, the proposal ‘wasn’t just drawn up in a vacuum. It was done after careful consultation, not only with the countries that signed onto it, but Israel itself.’ Instead, as he has done repeatedly in the Gaza negotiations, Netanyahu ...”

“... or of prison routine are the best records of these phenomena we have from his period. Similarly, John Rechy is a lyric novelist akin to the Beats, but his City of Night remains the best study of the gay underworld of the late Fifties in America. Nor is this function of gay fiction by any means exhausted. To take at random just three books that I’ve read ...”

“... and ‘high jinks’ – and framed events as though they were fictional. The playwright John Guare, who called Knox ‘my kind of murderess’, wondered whether she was a heroine in the mould of ‘Daisy Miller, an innocent young girl who goes to Europe for experience? Or is she Louise Brooks, the woman who takes what she wants and destroys ...”

“... of his celebrated inclination to detest ‘that animal called man’ while heartily loving ‘John, Peter, Thomas and so forth’. One of the experiences which finally persuades Septimus to seek professional help (‘He gave in’) is a hazardous stroll down Tottenham Court Road:In the street, vans roared past him; brutality blared out on placards; men ...”

“... into the early stages of a struggle for freedom or a mad, but heroic blow for righteousness. John Brown only looks good in retrospect. The chances of success in a war against terrorism are about the same as those in the war on drugs, which has destroyed the political and economic lives of several Latin American countries and left hundreds of thousands of ...”

“... Russian Lands’ – was cascading from every speech. At the Orthodox funeral, vividly recorded by John Lloyd in the last issue of the London Review, for the three who died at the underpass – one of them Jewish, but Russified for the occasion – Yeltsin, in the best style of the Little Father, resonantly besought forgiveness from the Russian people for ...”

“... unimpeded, in particular, by other people. Some thinkers, such as Hobbes and, some of the time, John Stuart Mill, think that this is the conception of freedom, and that it contains all that one knows or needs to know about its value. But this is to identify the seed and the plant, or the rhythm and the dance; it does not get us very far in answering ...”

“... after the last four years’; ‘Heavens, what a vale of tears it is’; ‘Oh heavens, now John Ashbery and I have to go and have an “intimate” lunch with Ivar Ivask.’) In 1973 she wrote to James Merrill: ‘I could weep myself to think of Mr [Chester] Kallman’s weeping over “The Moose”.’ There is no explanation as to how she learned that ...”

“... of policy and to the courts on matters of law. When a Home Secretary, Lord Halifax, was sued by John Wilkes for punitive damages for having unlawfully issued a general warrant to search for seditious papers, Chief Justice Wilmot told the jury: ‘The law makes no difference between great and petty officers. Thank God, they are all amenable to ...”

“... curator of the museum – the ‘Wonder House’. The curator is a tribute to Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, who moved to Bombay as curator of the J.J. School of Art in 1865, the year of Kipling’s birth. But through the figure of the curator, Kipling also indirectly acknowledges the existence of a colonial India of intellectual collaboration ...”

“... whom he confesses ‘a strange liking’ – his most influential model, or imaginative icon, is John Bunyan, whose life and work obsess him. Bunyan is ‘this dreamer and penman’, ‘the most prominent man of letters as far as English literature is concerned’, who had ‘the tinker’s power of reaching the heart’ – there is a hint of rural ...”

“... as people’. On the other hand, one could cite Nabokov’s afterword to the novel: ‘despite John Ray’s assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow.’ Equally external, this, but less positively identikit than Nabokov’s other opinions of these characters. I prefer Nabokov’s aesthetic as it emerges from a discussion of Gogol’s The Overcoat: ‘the ...”