“... he was a Princeton undergraduate (as I was almost fifty years later) with F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Peale Bishop, at a time of what seems now like relatively uncomplicated Wasp hegemony there and in the arts generally. His ties with that university remained deep, not only through his literary friends, but also through ...”

“... of the previous generation, he or she might well have mentioned, alongside Darwin and John Stuart Mill, the name of Sir Henry Maine, the subject of Karuna Mantena’s valuable new study. His name isn’t heard much anymore, but in his own day Maine (1822-88) was regarded as a towering public intellectual. He became regius professor of civil law at ...”

“... Oxfordshire and Bloomsbury, where Philipps was colonised by the Stracheys: Lytton was his mentor, John got him into left-wing politics, and at various points he was in analysis with James and in bed with Julia. Philipps’s father funded him while he tried to develop a career as a painter, but even by the lowish standards of Bloomsbury he was a terrible ...”

“... and instinctively deceitful. When his father died in 1930, he erected a tombstone claiming that John Jesse Barnes had served the full four years of the Civil War, instead of an actual six months.Numerous friends and acquaintances testified to Barnes’s ‘complexity’. The painter Thomas Hart Benton, for instance, described him as ‘magnificent ...”

“... as if she thought Catholicism were the special property of the Poles. The pontificate of Pope John Paul II has rather encouraged this proprietorial attitude. It is certainly impossible to exaggerate the contribution of the Pope, and especially of his triumphal return to Poland after his election, to the resurgence of national spirit and the success of ...”

“... riven with ideological dispute and internecine factionalism faces electoral disadvantages. As John Barnes brings out in his urbane essay on ideology and factions, Conservative ideology has rested in part on a scepticism about the adequacy of ideology itself. In this sense, neither the fervent Tariff Reformers of the early part of the century, nor the ...”

“... confidentiality were not believed. This natural reluctance was reinforced by the stress placed by Christian churches for the last thousand years on the sinfulness and shamefulness of sex. The poll-takers were baffled, since only a tiny handful, composed of the sexually most liberated sectors of society, would volunteer to speak frankly, and they were by ...”

“... good republicans. Instead, like the English Royalists, they subscribed to that tyrannical and Anti-Christian interest which England’s radical Protestants wished to extirpate throughout Europe. Until now the charges of base materialism which had been levelled at the Dutch as economic rivals had conflicted with their virtuous Protestant credentials. Now Dutch ...”

“... society that George Tomlinson (a future Bishop of Gibraltar) and II of his friends at St John’s College, Cambridge founded in 1820 – occupies a distinctive niche in British social mythology. Or, rather, it occupies several niches, according to the taste of the mythologiser. In the eyes of many of its members, looking back in later years on the ...”

“... actions would, if unchecked, infect the whole land with error. Hoccleve and his contemporary, John Lydgate, occupy a pivotal position in Strohm’s account. His careful contextualisation of their writing shows how concerned poems like Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes, finished in 1411, and Lydgate’s Troy Book, composed during Henry V’s reign, were to ...”

“... in Sheridan’s The Rivals) and the even more occasional dramatic location (as in Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island), the playwrights listed above wrote about England as if they were English. There may be Irish resonances in Waiting for Godot, but Beckett set it in no man’s land and wrote it in France (and when required to make short trips home to ...”

“... merely how the game sometimes has to be played.The means they ultimately chose was to rally around John Major as the person best placed to stop Heseltine. Thatcher reluctantly came to accept this and therefore to accept the ostensible reasons they gave for her stepping aside. Very soon she would regret having fallen for it. Yet it had been clear for some time ...”

“... Museum of Modern Art in New York has had a string of such figures, from William Rubin to John Elderfield to Leah Dickerman). Today the more telling split is between modern and contemporary fields (the latter has no exact birthdate – 1970, 1980, 1989), but this is a schism less between the university and the museum than between scholarly curators ...”

“... the dark gentleman ever to speak of it, but it bears a resemblance to that of Queen Victoria and John Brown, her favourite ghillie. Barbara Cartland, of course, could have made something of it. She was very pre-Oprah, and pre-Diana (her step-granddaughter), in believing it quite jolly for gels to be independent and bolters and all that, so long as they ...”

“... Luther King Jr had preached, and Jon Ossoff, who had interned with the Georgia civil rights hero, John Lewis, who died last July. (Warnock presided at Lewis’s funeral.) And on the morning of 6 January, both Warnock and Ossoff were declared victors in the Georgia run-offs, allowing the Democratic Party to take back the Senate.Warnock’s victory was ...”