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“... Beasts in interest. The volume has a valuable seventy-page introduction and some useful notes by John Haffenden, who arranges the material as far as possible in chronological order. The play or melodrama, Three Stories, was written when the poet was 20, and performed, with him in the cast, by the Cambridge ADC. Long supposed to have been lost as Empson ...”

“... an anchor of certainty and principle that it would be physically painful to haul it in. Listen to John Berger, tending the authentic mulch of pig earth and keeping his ear close to his own well-manured ground, as he instructed the readers of the Guardian on 25 February: The Rushdie affair has already cost several human lives and threatens to cost many, many ...”

“... a firm most notable for creating the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who, in 2004, derailed John Kerry’s presidential campaign by claiming he had been falsely decorated as a war hero. CRC – it stands for Creative Response Concepts – is also the publicist for the Federalist Society, which, in the Trump era, has successfully promoted the appointment ...”

“... observing the law – ‘lest terrorists win by inducing a kind of bunker terrorism’. John O’Sullivan emphasises the need to deny them publicity. In the best piece in the book Leszek Kolakowski discusses legitimacy and terrorism, pointing out that the armed struggle of the underground partisans against the Nazi occupation was perfectly ...”

“... compels them, each in misery, to abandon the affair. Seeing Hari’s deep distress, Amar’s Christian wife Sita, whom Myers makes the most simply admirable of all the women, almost a moral touchstone, realises that ‘he had at least put some genuine feeling into it. She could believe that it had been a romance and not mere loveless gallantry.’ But ...”

“... Church. ‘I don’t think it’s much to do with Christianity,’ he cheerfully explained to John Haffenden in an interview, ‘Irish Catholicism is continuous with something older than Christianity.’ That had been a powerful idea in earlier literary nationalism: Daniel Corkery’s The Hidden Ireland (1924), for instance, posited an underlying echt ...”

“... We learn that Egdon Heath offered him the possibility of ‘unity of place’ and was, ‘as John Bayley astutely suggests, nothing less than “a microcosm of the dark indifferent universe in which human life has to be carried on”.’ It thus ‘becomes the perfect setting for the social, political and intellectual upheavals of the age that the novel ...”

“... Monthly, the Nation and the New Republic. He achieved wide renown with his arguments against the Christian pacifism that had been the dominant strain in Protestant intellectual circles in the 1930s; a teacher of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and an associate of Paul Tillich, he worked with as single a mind as theirs to draw the German people away from Hitler’s ...”

“... What could be more fitting than that his Notebooks should be edited by two fastidious scholars, John Gere, until lately the Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, and John Sparrow – Sparrow who at the age of 15 met Geoffrey Keynes on the steps of St Paul’s to inspect Donne’s effigy in his shroud and ...”

“... like Wilson and Blair – by not being about anything.The prominent British political theorist John Gray has also been seen as chameleonic. His passage from Mill to Hayek to Berlin (he has written books on each of them) has prompted charges of swaying with the wind or, still less charitably, being a Vicar of Bray. The Hayek phase coincided with ...”

“... It has become the party of wars and jails, and its moral physiognomy is captured by the faces of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, faces hard to match outside Cruikshank’s drawings of Dickens’s villains, hard as nails and mean as dirt and with an issue still up their sleeve when wars wind down and the jails are full: a sworn hostility towards immigrants ...”

“... to complete the OT, thus rendering the Hebrew Bible retrospectively ‘incomplete’ from the Christian point of view. Typology – the study of persons, objects and events in Old Testament history, prefiguring ‘some person or thing revealed in the new dispensation’ – essentially regarded what was past as prologue, a set of signs predicting their ...”

“... England’ received the very epitome of grave, tasteful and well-regarded biography. John Gore chronicled the inner man, his tastes, hobbies and friendships; and Harold Nicolson described his public life and times. Nicolson’s book in particular did as much to confirm George’s reputation as a good king as it did to confirm his own reputation ...”

“... he doth smite you under the first rib.’ The pamphlet bears the influence of the Leveller leader John Lilburne, a recurring figure in Como’s radical coalition and the subject of Michael Braddick’s commanding and enlivening new biography. Lilburne fought courageously for Parliament as the nation’s defender against tyranny, but turned his eloquence and ...”

“... the country in search of old records that a handful of them – Skip James, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt – were ‘rediscovered’. They became draws on the coffee-house and festival circuit, while recordings by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who had made their names playing house-rocking, amplified ...”