“... to leave France in the face of royal prohibition, they continued to be busy and productive. John Houblon, from a Huguenot family which had arrived from France in a slightly earlier wave of Catholic persecution, became the first governor of the Bank of England in 1694 and a knight of the realm; until 2014, his luxuriantly bewigged features adorned our ...”

“... Greek and Roman Antiquities, Liddell and Scott’s Greek lexicon, Anthon’s Latin primer and the King James Bible. Horowitz’s second appendix is entitled ‘Allusion as Proof in the Search for Henry James’. But allusion is very difficult to prove. Even if the allusions that Horowitz has identified are indeed there, and even if they are deliberate, that ...”

“... history of the screenplay is complicated, and it seems clear that Orson Welles, Mankiewicz and John Houseman all had a hand in it. Mankiewicz signed a contract that meant he would receive payment for his work but not get a credit; later, he managed to get his name, along with Welles’s, on screen. The film’s single Oscar went to both of them. They had ...”

“... money from, pictures of this sort: for Sir George Beaumont The Blind Fiddler; for the financier John Julius Angerstein (who paid 800 guineas) The Village Holiday; for the Prince Regent Blind Man’s Buff (finished 1813). Wilkie became an associate and then a member of the Royal Academy while very young; he was knighted and made a painter to the ...”

“... so are disposable nappies.The English were early movers in the campaign to free the bound baby – John Locke spoke out against swaddling in Some Thoughts Concerning Education – but in France, despite Rousseau, it had a longer history. As babies make no comment, the relative comfort of papoose mode and free-kicking mode are hard to judge, but decisions about ...”

“... the court, leading to widespread calls for the Bourbons to listen to the young artists. In 1839, King Louis-Philippe finally relented and banned the felling of the centuries-old oaks in Bas-Bréau – a significant victory for Rousseau and his contemporaries.The title of the Petit Palais show alludes to Rousseau’s claim, as a romantic pantheist, that he ...”

“... Except for two years as a fighter pilot in the RAF, John Colville was Churchill’s Private Secretary throughout the war, and again during his peacetime premiership of 1951-5. Some readers will enjoy his diaries mainly as a portrait of Churchill, whose blazing presence and wealth of eccentricity light up almost every page ...”

“... up to regard the Washington political stage as his natural domain – his great-grandfather John Adams was the first president to live in the White House; his grandfather was John Quincy Adams – and he could never keep away from the city and its gossip for long. But his early political heroes soon revealed feet of ...”

“... it from the spiritual. The greatest of Irish medieval thinkers, the ninth-century philosopher John Scottus Eriugena, saw the cosmos as a self-delighting play of pure difference, in which subject and object, perceiver and perceived, were intimately allied. In some ways, his thought is a lot closer to Nietzsche and poststructuralism than it is to Leibniz or ...”

“... John Carey, former Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, an authority on Milton and Donne and Dickens and others, the very model of a Merton Professor, has also been, for decades, the chief reviewer of the Sunday Times, a BBC sage, a sought-after chairman of panels, a man well known for his strong opinions on all matters to do with literature and the other arts ...”

“... These biographies of John Gielgud by Jonathan Croall and Sheridan Morley are quite hard to tell apart. They are of much the same size, bear handsome pictures of the actor in old age on the front of their dust-jackets, and are, inevitably, affectionate and indulgent towards their subject. As Dirk Bogarde remarked when Croall consulted him about the work in hand, ‘everybody adored him, so the book might make rather flat reading ...”

“... is damned after hearing a livid sermon that could have been preached in 1690 to the followers of King Billy; yet the Swinging Sixties are coming. Ma has glamorous outfits and the film has a Van Morrison soundtrack. When he is caught up in the looting of a supermarket, Buddy snatches the latest must-have, a box of biological washing powder. There is a sense ...”

“... private property or surplus, without stress, in balance with nature. In a long conversation with John Carvel, far the most astonishing and winning part of this book, he lays out his own Livingstonian anthropology. These wandering bands did not know war, as the inhabitants of the nuclear-free zone of Lewisham shall not know war. They were ‘a very ...”

“... in Wheatley’s verse residues of African spiritual practices and memories of her birthplace. John Shields has argued that her elegies are compatible with African animist traditions, and proposes that her background was with the Fula people. Odell said Phillis described her mother pouring water ‘before the sun at his rising’, which has led some to ...”

“... whether to introduce ‘some bursts of fine writing’, an indulgence best left to Viceroys. John Keay, the drily witty author of Travellers Extraordinary (and, earlier, Eccentric Travellers), comes as a timely model of concision. His heroes are the coxcombs and humbugs of travel, or pretended travel. The best-known is Louis de Rougemont, alias Henry ...”