“... the author of The Logic of Political Economy, an exposition of the ideas of David Ricardo, which John Stuart Mill, for one, thought ‘very successful’. He wouldn’t have needed to owe rent on multiple rooms and houses, had it not been that the landlords held his drafts and papers hostage as collateral for his debts. Things improved steadily when his ...”

“... of her first novel behind her, Bedford got a contract to write an entire book about the trial of John Bodkin Adams – the Harold Shipman of his time – at the Old Bailey that year. The book begins with the judge’s entrance, ‘trailing a wake of subtlety, of secret powers, age’ and ends three and a half weeks later with the not guilty verdict. In ...”

“... behaviourist tradition that came to dominate American psychology in the 20th century, pioneered by John B. Watson after the First World War and later identified with B.F. Skinner, was established with the explicit aim of rendering human responses predictable and thereby controllable. Psychology would abandon any theory of mind in favour of data on observable ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... successful oddball adventurers. Of the young men who ‘pacified’ the Punjab in the late 1840s, John Nicholson, for instance, was a ‘brute’ (Tidrick’s word) who hated Indians. If one spat in his presence, he would have the man held down till he licked up his spittle. He nevertheless revelled in leading a private army of Pathans on punitive ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... become a winner, to lift yourself out of the group and leave all those losers behind. But unlike John Ford or Jean Renoir – whose Toni also tells a story of tragic love among migrant workers – Malick conveys scant sense of the group, the living relationships, concordant or discordant, that bind people together. Like the outlaw couple in Badlands, the ...”

“... It probably doesn’t help that the IPs we get to hear about are usually the celebrities: Elton John and David Furnish; Annie Leibovitz; Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Surrogacy is one of those subjects on which ‘colour-blind – white – feminism’ tends not to mince words. ‘A human-rights violation’, the journalist Julie Bindel called it in 2018 ...”

“... Pompeo, a militarist with a particular hatred for Iran, and as his third national security adviser John Bolton, an anti-Muslim fanatic of the Cheney circle. Leaders of both parties continue to nurse the most dangerous illusions about the prospect of regime change in Iran, with the People’s Mujahedin of Iran and other sympathetic terrorist outfits presumably ...”

“... sat so Martin could walk; Martin walked so Obama could run; Obama is running so we all can fly!’ John McCain, hapless Republican candidate in 2008, charged that his rival was a lightweight international ‘celebrity’, like Britney Spears. To many white liberals, however, Obama seemed to guarantee instant redemption from the crimes of a democracy built on ...”

“... anchorite St Alphege, who in Rees-Mogg’s exegesis was England’s first tax martyr; and John Locke, whom he characterised with cynical vagueness as a champion of the people against government. That speech set the key for his parliamentary excursions into history and literature, armed with the kind of cute patriotic simpleness one might have found in ...”

“... religion’, in which America is a ‘shining city’ where the sacred fire of freedom is kept. John Keegan recently announced, in the course of a television debate in which I also took part, that to allow ‘cultural history’ onto the protected turf of war studies is to issue a chaotic licence to mavericks who will write about ‘anything at all’. Yet ...”