“... ever met McCorvey; ‘Jane Roe’ was just a common pseudonym for a woman in legal proceedings, as John Roe (sometimes Poe, Doe or Hoe) was for a man. Coffee would probably have continued to work on the case by herself if she hadn’t received a phone call from her old law school classmate Sarah Weddington. They weren’t friends, but Weddington had a question ...”

“... won admirers among the black writers who emerged during the Black Power era, such as LeRoi Jones, John A. Williams and Ishmael Reed. And his legacy now? As Jackson writes, ‘history has borne out some of his vinegary judgments.’ Today, Himes’s belief in the implacable force of white supremacism – what is now called Afro-pessimism – enjoys a growing ...”

“... in a bitter final chapter, ‘has not honoured the pain of our people in its politics’. John Jeffrey, the current deputy minister of justice, told him in September 2017 that turning a blind eye to the murder of the Cradock Four and others such as the activist Steve (Bantu) Biko ‘was the price that had to be paid’. Partly for budgetary ...”

“... and Lesbian Centre. (Margaret Thatcher may be impossible to displace as a totem of oppression, but John Major has been prime minister for a couple of years by the time the book begins.) The only actual gay character in the book, if you exclude the passing dreamboat in his van, is Chickie Jamieson, an elderly, unthreatening and neuter-seeming neighbour of the ...”

“... before long. If he’d never met McLaren, it’s perfectly possible that Sid – real name John Ritchie – would be alive today. McLaren would say that an early grave and an eternal place in rock mythology is a better fate.In​ recent years, the idea of ‘offence’ as a cultural stratagem has migrated from left to right, casting an unsettling ...”

“... she really does have his best interests at heart. In the foreword to another book, Truth Games by John Forrester, Phillips says that ‘it is one of the paradoxes of beginning in analysis that the patient agrees to buy something that no one can really describe.’ The end of the analysis comes about, perhaps, when the patient is led to realise that the ...”

“... affair than it actually is. It is striking that authoritative Rousselians such as Ford or John Ashbery, one of Roussel’s earliest and still most unflagging supporters, seem to describe his work with a beguiling sense of calmness and equanimity, in a tone a bit like that of a pathologist describing a wound to a colleague. In a wonderfully ...”

“... though for me it spoils the ‘line’ of the poem – was reinstated at the petitioning of John Berryman in For the Union Dead (1964); a revised version of that is printed as a separate poem called ‘Ovid and Caesar’s Daughter’ in History (1973); and now Bidart and Gewanter have unearthed a seven-stanza monster that was printed in the Kenyon ...”

“... bold, confident, proud, unembarrassed, modern, European, grand. We were none of these things under John Major, and only partly one or two of them under Mrs Thatcher when we went to war. Furthermore, it was a very open, self-imperilling and therefore very trusting thing for a leader to do. Blair didn’t just take the national mood as fixed, he set about ...”

“... often depicted on pots. But until the 1952 decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, the ruling orthodoxy was that a hypothesised ‘Minoan’ was the (un-Greek) language of the palace culture of Crete and the Mycenaean settlements, so that the origins of the Iliad must come after that, not earlier than the start of the first ...”

“... like Dadie [Rylands] shun me. I am so distinguished yet so undistinguished,’ he writes. John Barton snubs him, showing ‘coltish contempt’; ‘I am so accustomed to being liked or at worst ignored, and my reputation awes people into civility – even if they think I don’t deserve it.’ In general, he says, ‘I like an evening where I talk a ...”

“... Dickens’s suffering as he later and very emotionally recalled it for his friend and biographer, John Forster. He was not beaten, starved or ill-treated in any way. The factory was run by an acquired cousin, the son of a widower who had married Dickens’s aunt. He worked there for a year or less before returning to school and normal middle-class life. What ...”

“... by levelling a tax on every financial transaction. It has been embraced by the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, and 11 European countries plan to introduce something like it, called the Financial Transaction Tax. Britain will not be one of those countries while the Conservatives are in charge. Shifting vast, destabilising amounts of money from place to ...”

“... was close to those of the sculptor William Wetmore Story, about whom he would write a book, and John Addington Symonds, on whom he would base his story ‘The Author of “Beltraffio”’. During this first visit to Italy he was stepping lightly on places he and his characters would subsequently grow to know intimately, to suffer in, to haunt. He studied ...”

“... performance as ‘bordering on disaster’. A week later, the head of the Metronet consortium, John Weight, was sacked. The big, meaty capital programmes that the PPP was supposed to ‘incentivise’ Metronet to do weren’t happening. None of the eight stations it was supposed to have refurbished are finished, and track renewals are way behind ...”