“... can’t carry much at my age. A little pint bottle is quite heavy.’ He introduced me to John Russell, an 88-year-old ex-engineer in a residential care home. ‘I saw one old lady trying to stagger off with six bottles,’ Russell said. ‘They were carried for her by a complete stranger.’ He introduced me to Joan Bufton, whose daughter needs ...”

“... vides was published in 1974, which is late for the scholarship pupil plot in Britain and Ireland. John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams: they were all born between the end of the First World War and the early 1930s, and published their stories of class alienation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s a bit late, too, for the ...”

“... harder edges of Thatchersim have been rubbed into a certain fubsiness by a ‘kinder, gentler’ John Major. What seems to be gathering power among the middle and professional classes is a new republicanism, a desire for a complete political representation of the Whig dream. This was Margaret Thatcher’s dream also, and why she cried (when given the ...”

“... brother-in-law Sean MacBride – Maud Gonne’s son by the Irish revolutionary John MacBride – had been Chief of Staff of the IRA until 1936; Stuart had also maintained informal contact with some of his old colleagues from the Civil War, those who had not followed de Valera and joined Fianna Fáil, which entered the Dáil in 1926 and took ...”

“... Labour’s levels of borrowing on the eve of the crash compared favourably with those of John Major’s Conservative government in the early 1990s; and – even if Labour’s petting of the financial sector had left Britain overexposed – in his Keynesian response to the crisis, Gordon Brown had pulled the economy back from the brink of ...”

“... three acknowledged illegitimate children. ‘I wonder what Lady Wilde thought of her husband?’ John Butler Yeats wrote to his son in 1921. ‘When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs Butt found her with her husband when her circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it – so that she could afford to be wise and tolerant.’ (Mrs Butt’s husband was ...”

“... Ideologies could play different roles at different stages in their history. In the epoch of John Paul II it was easy to forget that in the time of its total power, Roman Christianity was the religion of the Inquisition and the ethnic cleansing of the Jews and Moors from Spain. Likewise in Russia, what had been the ideology of the gulag could also become ...”

“... a resumé of Gaddafi’s career shown on BBC World Service Television on the night of 20 October, John Simpson stopped well short of endorsing either charge, noting of the Berlin bombing that ‘it may or may not have been Colonel Gaddafi’s work,’ an honest formula that acknowledged the room for doubt. Of Lockerbie he remarked cautiously that Libya ...”

“... with the job, the baton passed to civil servants and to a junior minister responsible for energy, John Battle. Battle was from Leeds, a Catholic and an activist for social justice whose life until that point – studying the poetry of William Empson, training for the priesthood, setting up Church Action on Poverty to campaign for a minimum wage and mastering ...”

“... Review’ at all?He died in 1973 and the magazine started in 1974. We had pieces about him. John Fuller was a great admirer. I’m not sure if he wrote of him in the magazine but there were things about Auden. We also had a lot of literary reminiscences in which he figured.Speaking earlier about the business side of the magazine, you made light of it ...”

“... for the labours of its president, Giscard d’Estaing, assisted by a British factotum, John Kerr, the two real authors of the draft, their presence was of no consequence. The future charter of Europe was written for the establishments of the West, the governments of the existing 15 member states who had to approve it, relegating the countries of ...”

“... the European Commission and other national governments were baffled by and suspicious of what John Sheail, in his history of British environmentalism, calls ‘the concept of making payments to farmers to farm below the maximum’. There were mutterings that it was illegal. But the commission came round, and Europe took up the concept. For the first ...”

“... a movie camera was pointed their way. Peter gave me a handful of oddments before I left, in a John Lewis bag with white and green stripes, folded over and taped down. There were some photos, he said, and some papers he thought I’d find interesting. He used Maureen’s old formula: ‘The photos,’ he said, ‘have what I call sentimental value.’ I ...”

“... from La Paz to view the body, and the famous photographs were taken – later compared by John Berger to Mantegna’s Dead Christ and Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson. That evening, when the journalists had gone, the two local doctors performed an autopsy, which showed beyond doubt that Guevara had been shot long after capture, though this only emerged ...”

“... playfulness’, a habit characterised rather more severely by a friendly critic of Forster, John Beer, who remarks that language of this sort may war against the ‘serious point’. In an essay called ‘Word-Making and Sound-Taking’, Forster discusses some remarks of the novelist-potter William de Morgan on ‘a tune by Beethoven’, apparently from ...”