“... The dust jacket of the final volume of Bevis Hillier’s epic life of John Betjeman shows the poet laureate seized by giggles. In this lengthy coda to Hillier’s authorised biography Betjeman appears in many lights, but he’s rarely carefree. ‘Nothing frightens me more than the thought of dying,’ he told a friend in 1958 ...”

“... either scholarly – new material come to light – or critical: new slant on a known personality. John Bierman does have some fresh material. ‘New documentary sources,’ he writes, ‘include the hitherto unpublished expedition journals of William Grant Stairs and memoirs of Alice Pike Barney’; he also pays generous tribute to Richard Hall’s earlier ...”

“... Karin Roffman​ ’s superb biography of John Ashbery’s early life concludes with a photograph of the poet striding towards the camera. He is a tallish, handsome young man. The photograph was taken in the autumn of 1955 when he was 28, shortly after he arrived in Montpellier to begin his Fulbright Fellowship. He looks to have the world at his feet ...”

“... John Minton’s face is familiar – if not from the self-portrait now in the National Portrait Gallery, then from the likeness he commissioned from Lucian Freud and bequeathed to the Royal College of Art. It is very long, large-eyed, hollow-cheeked, with a receding chin and dark tousled hair. Photographs suggest that the self-portrait is a better physical likeness; the truth about his emotional state seems to lie with Lucian Freud ...”

“... John Enoch Powell was an eminent classical scholar, as his entry in Who’s Who proclaimed: Craven Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1931; First Chancellor’s Classical Medallist; Porson Prizeman; Browne Medallist, 1932; fellow of Trinity, 1934-38; professor of Greek at the University of Sydney, 1937-39. He was 25 when he was appointed to the chair at Sydney ...”

“... conference (‘Geneva II’) in January 2014. On the very first day, the US secretary of state, John Kerry, declared: ‘There is no way, no way possible, that a man who has led a brutal response to his own people can regain legitimacy to govern.’ So the US position was unchanged: Assad had to go, which meant that the Syrian government would not engage in ...”

“... becoming an annual tradition. We went through Slough, and one slogan we chanted was a riposte to John Betjeman’s poem, with its call for ‘friendly bombs’ to fall on the town: ‘Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Slough – THINK NOW!’In the summer Charlotte worked in London as a volunteer for the Africa Bureau, an anti-colonial think tank and part of the ...”

“... years. The best painters of the period were their friends and fellow alumni of the Slade: Paul and John Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts and David Bomberg. They were all influenced, directly or indirectly, by Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910, which introduced the British to Continental ...”

“... Cook, scientific director of the Grapple test series; some recent disclosures on the part of John Ward, who was employed at the British nuclear weapons laboratory at Aldermaston for six months during 1955; and a group of declassified US documents obtained by Robert Norris of the Natural Resources Defence Council in Washington. It may well be that there ...”

“... for cases like that of the Manhattan life-insurance saleswoman who sent donations to Oral Roberts, a preacher who raised millions of dollars by proclaiming that God would ‘call him home’ if he did not receive the money. Balmer, who hopes to explain as well as entertain, sometimes plays down the strangeness of his subjects by emphasising the ...”

“... that Cannadine edits operate perforce at a much more basic level, and find it hard to take wing. John Davies’s essay on the Marquises of Bute and their dealings with Cardiff provides the vertebrae for a history of that city. The Bute initiative of the 1830s in equipping the coal export trade of South Wales with its infrastructure, mainly docks, was ...”

“... Denis Thatcher is entirely inventable – as John Wells understood: he comes in a flat pack with easy-to-follow instructions, all the components familiar general shapes, all parts from stock, no odd angles, no imagination required. When they came up with the idea for Ikea, they used Denis Thatcher as the prototype ...”

“... has placed all the relevant Joycean locations in James Joyce: Triestine Itineraries. And now John McCourt, founder and director of the annual Trieste Joyce School has published a study of Joyce’s life and work in that first decade of exile, with a brief coda covering his return after the end of the war. The details offered are not often new: after ...”

“... US were handing out pamphlets on ‘How to speak up about gender identity’. Its president, Kevin Roberts, would later decry ‘the woke industrial complex’ in a speech about the death of ‘global Europe’. On the opposite side of the hall, a man from the Danube Institute gave me back copies of the Hungarian Conservative. He had come straight from a US ...”

“... 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 ...”