“... finally, like a wine sauce, into an ultramontane oddity? Those vexed by the thought should turn to John Davis’s collection of historical essays, Gramsci and Italy’s Passive Revolution.4 It is concerned with aspects of Italy’s failed revolution, in both the 19th and the 20th centuries. Mr Davis’s lucid introduction emphasises how essential this context ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the propaganda and makes a fair and sensible speech on the Middle East – such as Governor John Connally in 1980 – is taught a sharp lesson. Jewish Americans make up only 2.7 per cent of the population of the United States, but partly because of their concentration in some pivotal states and mainly because of their influence on the American media and ...”

“... reappraisal of how to govern the Health Service. She and her ministers – Jenkin, Norman Fowler, John Moore and Clarke – replaced consensus with confrontation (Clarke to the BMA: ‘you buggers will sabotage it’). They imported asphyxiating management practices from Sainsbury’s, and, by undermining professional commitment, introduced a nine-to-five ...”

“... their own glory or catastrophe. The stories hang together well, the odd man out being Corporal John Ledyard, a marine, of Groton, Connecticut. (Another Boy’s Own boy: Thomas Jefferson encouraged him to walk from Siberia to Nootka Sound, off Vancouver Island, and on to Virginia. He was arrested at Irkutsk and returned to the Polish border; later he was ...”

“... teaching and writing of history in English education in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. John Burrow, Reba Softer, Doris Goldstein, Donald Winch, Stefan Collini, Dwight Culler, Deborah Wormell and Rosemary Jann among others have written on one or another dimension. As a secondary but related argument, Slee says that scholars have tended to use the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... cooking. All the good in the world has always been done after a good dinner.’ If the historian John Tosh’s picture of Victorian masculinities is correct, Household Management was first published during a rather brief cultural moment when men were exceptionally satisfied with their absorption into a domesticity controlled by their wives. It seems clear ...”

“... at Mahoney when she brings coffee in on a serving tray, but otherwise ignore her. Mike Nichols and John Hersey win grudging approval – the former for giving her a nice tip, the latter for his kindly, slightly alcoholic smile (‘He had the look of a person who understood other people, who wanted to hear what they had to say’). Joseph Alsop, making chitchat ...”

“... accuracy was not the question here: Sigismondo, after all, is in some sense another name for John Quinn, the New York lawyer and cultural patron whose generosity had been indispensable to the cultural economy of Modernism. But was that all? Was Mussolini, for Pound, merely a phantasmagoric projection of the Modernist patron? Admirers of Pound have often ...”

“... coded message to students at an elementary or intermediate level: ‘Don’t try this at home.’ John Atkinson tries to discover the impact on Alexander’s historians of the end of the Roman Republic, looking for development between Diodorus and Curtius by way of Timagenes of Alexandria. I confess I had not paid much attention in the past to Timagenes, an ...”

“... people, even if this meant ceaseless tensions and a permanent identity crisis. In 2001, when John Howard’s Liberal government was returned to power with an increased majority, it found the post-9/11 climate wholly sympathetic to its belief that further doses of nationalist purgative were required, in order to allay the strains of a still novel ...”

“... not seem conventionally left-wing and draw on a broad range of thinkers on political economy – John Stuart Mill, Braudel, Karl Polanyi, Immanuel Wallerstein, Joseph Stiglitz – in their critique of the neo-liberal model of growth. In recent years, Cui’s articles in Dushu, a monthly journal of ideas co-edited by Wang Hui, the New Left author of a history ...”