“... We are living through a great era of saint-making. Under John Paul II an industrial revolution has overtaken the Vatican, an age of mass production. Saints are fast-tracked to the top, and there are beatifications by the bucket-load. It seems a shame to have all the virtues required for beatification, but not to get your full name in the Catholic Almanac Online ...”

“... in his Ciuile Conuersation (1586), simply part of his master; and ‘to be no part of any body’, John Donne wanly observed – having failed to secure a place to which he had ‘submitted himself’ – was ‘to be nothing’. By the same token, the public identity of a lord was dependent on his retinue of servants, whose principal function was to display ...”

“... to photograph celebrities, very few of the resulting pictures really worked. On the other hand, as John Berendt, who commissioned her for Esquire noted, ‘her eyes would light up at the mere suggestion of oddity, deformity, depravity.’ When the Sunday Times magazine in London tried to interest her in taking pictures of terminally ill patients in a ...”

“... of the muddled centre, as Goldhill wants us to see him, counterposed against sexual radicals like John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter: it is like using Greta Garbo to make a point about the excesses of Oliver Reed. (Here, as elsewhere, there is an unresolvable tension between the idea of queerness as ambivalence, and Goldhill’s desire to make that ...”

“... a wallpaper brush. I go to an uninformative briefing with my new friends in the RAF. Group Captain John Fynes says: ‘I’ve been told I’m not to lie to you.’ I ask if this is a new policy.28 February. I am due to have lunch with Entisar, an Iraqi woman living in Kuwait I met when I was here a few weeks ago. She thinks I look like Tony Blair, which I do ...”

“... and comical vividness is the hallmark of Audenian experience, which occurs within situations, as John Bayley once charmingly put it, ‘which we can imagine occurring to the poet as he closes his eyes for a liberating instant between two minutes of actual living’. The poem plays with the idea of knowing things and conveys the feeling of being puzzled by ...”

“... but was a blockbuster bestseller, popping to number one on the fiction list just ahead of John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. We shall never see the noble likes of such bestseller lists again. Twenty years after his debut with Dangling Man (1944), after an already notable run that included The Adventures of Augie March (his ...”

“... opening of the embassy in Jerusalem, says that ‘you can’t be saved by being a Jew.’ Reverend John C. Hagee, the televangelist who gave the closing benediction, has described the Holocaust as God’s way of getting Jews ‘to come back to the land of Israel’. Netanyahu has yet to pronounce on this theory of the Holocaust, but he has expressed the view ...”

“... chief priorities of Corbyn’s Labour Party were neatly captured in two speeches made by John McDonnell, his shadow chancellor and often the project’s most eloquent spokesman. In 2016 he declared that Labour members would ‘no longer have to whisper’ the word ‘socialism’: the party would no longer be ashamed of its values. And in the dying ...”

“... she could close America’s political divide’) to the Democratic nomination and then defeating John McCain in the presidential election – he felt he had proved something both about himself and his country. ‘My having been elected president was proof that the American idea endures.’ It’s a big claim. No one else, by implication, could make ...”

“... is enshrouded in seventy years of mythologising, but no less impressive for that. As John D. Kelly has emphasised, a Singaporean cultural identity was forged within a decade: Malays in Singapore went overnight from being the Bumiputera – the chosen sons of the soil – to a minority; Indians had to forget memories of their prowess in the Indian ...”

“... At one dinner party of New Age contributors, Mansfield – who was going by Yékaterina – met John Middleton Murry, an Oxford student who was starting up an art and literary magazine of his own, Rhythm. He was already her fan: ‘In a German Pension seemed to express, with a power I envied, my own revulsion from life,’ he would write in his ...”

“... male figure in these scenes is Autolycus. The best Leontes (probably) of the last century, John Gielgud, once wrote to Peter Brook that he would love the opportunity to double Leontes with Autolycus; and Autolycus, for all the obvious differences, can be seen as a surrogate Leontes. He alone, of the three seniors, has some spellbinding mastery not ...”

“... East Africa? It gathers up the experience of all the conflicting parties in what Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, in their important 1992 study, called the ‘Unhappy Valley’. Was there a hidden political motive, unstated in any of the official documents? There was a widespread impression among the settlers that the prosecution of the Selwyns was intended to ...”

“... the case with Alzheimer’s that illness uncovers truth, it seems both to Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley (‘Puss’), and to her biographer, Peter Conradi, that it did so here. In their view Murdoch’s advancing illness, crumbling away language and reason, laid bare in her an essential impulse toward love. As words broke up, it was the vocabulary of ...”