“... 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 ...”

“... in the North, campaigned against Britain joining the EEC at the 1975 referendum. His successor, John Ryman, later jailed for (non-political) fraud, also disdained the Common Market. He called Helmut Schmidt a ‘patronising Hun’. Ronnie Campbell was a die-hard Lexiter; his Tory successor, Ian Levy, rode to victory on Brexit. The figures from the 1975 ...”

“... one of the reasons Clag was popular.Things were less straightforward with the Reverend Canon John Grove, a bachelor clergyman in his sixties who had been the school’s headmaster for two decades. Even by the modest standards of the day, the monotony of Canon Grove’s dress was striking. I never saw him in anything other than his black ...”

“... except in such recherché musical circles as the coterie around Nadia Boulanger in Paris or by John Cage’s epigoni everywhere. Roldan, also a remarkable conductor, died of a skin cancer in the face in his early thirties. Cruelly deformed, in his last performances he had to climb the podium wearing a silk mask. Caturla, a country judge who used to compose ...”

“... London dispatched no less a figure than the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir John Harding. Within a month of his arrival in 1955, he told the cabinet with brutal candour that if self-determination was ruled out, ‘a regime of military government must be established and the country run indefinitely as a police state.’ He was as good as ...”

“... the first systematic comparison of the American and French Revolutions, translated into English by John Quincy Adams; and set out in his Political Condition of Europe before and after the French Revolution the first strategic theorisation of the need for the anciens régimes of Europe to transcend traditional balance of power politics and reach an accord to ...”

“... That’s what he said without prompting, and on the Wednesday evening he had a conversation with John Barradell, the City of London’s extremely well-connected town clerk. Barradell has what you might call a leading interest in the operations of London Resilience, the set of protocols that go into action during a major emergency in the capital. At this ...”