“... high-powered grammar schools and industrial workbenches that produced men such as Penney and John Corner: at times, one feels transported to one of those Fifties films in which middle-aged young men in macs and hats and black spectacles are forever jumping into Daimlers and roaring down to Wallingford. The target of the British bomb, as has long been ...”

“... list if you had known what to look for, just as you would have spotted his counterpart in MI5, Sir John Lewis Jones, in the honours list immediately prior to that). What, then, is the point of the fantastic governmental mumbo-jumbo with which the British ‘Secret Service’ surrounds itself? Although it is a rather youthful bureaucratic invention, only about ...”

“... what they call ‘disinformation’, and it seems to me that Powers has adopted their line on all major questions. Anyway, the book is a defence of the CIA, and as such I think it fails. Powers thinks the CIA is controlled. The debate focuses on the Kennedy era – because it is assumed that if any American president genuinely wanted to control the CIA it was ...”

“... less grave than the anachronistic and sentimental idea, entertained by the supposedly tough-minded John Berger in his television series, that Frans Hals intended his late group portraits to expose the true horror of bourgeois society. Civilisation certainly extends our sympathies; it may deepen our understanding of European history; but it avoids challenging ...”

“... 1840s the two most notable Greek histories in Britain, and indeed in Europe, were by the Scotsman John Gillies, who dedicated his work to George III with the assurance that it exemplified ‘the dangerous Turbulence of Democracy’, and the outspokenly Tory William Mitford. Macaulay noted Mitford’s liking for Sparta and dislike of Athens; Byron declared ...”

“... seen by night and day, and amazing silhouettes of people, pumps and scaffolding. It’s as if John Ford had decided to start a western among the California oil rigs, and track his story up the West Coast to Puget Sound. The space around the people in this movie is so large and so unambiguously beautiful you have to wonder what story it is trying to ...”

“... habits are hard to break, or because he thinks he can write a thriller that is also a work of art. John Banville, to his credit, understands that crime fiction is only crime fiction. The Lemur, his third book under the pen name Benjamin Black, is a slim, efficient novel, elegantly done as such things go, in which literary pretensions are largely resisted and ...”

“... than the Whigs from the intolerable rectitude of the bien pensant. The austere righteousness of a John Stuart Mill, for example – the governess-figure of ‘Miss Mill’ in Judy’s Mid-Victorian caricatures – must have alienated many who clung to the belief that virtue need not debar one from all the cakes and ale of comfortable prejudices. Yet the very ...”

“... John Murray’s fiction has always seemed to arise directly from the circumstances of his own life. At first, his work concentrated on his childhood and adolescence among the tiny, depressed communities that straggle along the English side of the Solway Firth. He then broke with his working-class background and read Sanskrit and Avestan at Oxford, later studying classical Indian medicine ...”

“... Ulster or the Six Counties. Not a linguistic inch. At a higher level, where languages meet, John Hewitt’s poetry favours the word ‘stubborn’, Seamus Heaney’s the word ‘obstinate’. It follows that rhetorical exclusion is potentially territorial exclusion. Ms Belfrage grasps the point that, in Republican theory, ‘the Protestants don’t fit ...”

“... saw as ‘dull and heavy’, Cobbett could seem to an almost eerie degree a living embodiment of John Bull. This was how James Gillray represented him at the time; and it was also how he enjoyed representing himself. He was ‘an Englishman’, he boasted in 1795, ‘a calf of John Bull’, and the older he got, the more ...”

“... desperate hours on Malta, describes the moment when the veteran grand master of the Knights of St John, Jean de La Valette, leapt into the gash the Turks had made in the bastion of Castile, after the other fort on the island, St Elmo, had already fallen.‘Come, my knights,’ he cried. ‘Let us all go and die there! This is the day!’ When his staff urged ...”

“... lived separate from them in the house of their guardian, but was faithfully kept in touch with by John: who here writes cheerfully promising to get his sister anything she would like, barring ‘livestock’ – always better and more kindly left in its natural environment: – though I must confess even now a partiality for a handsome Globe of gold-fish ...”

“... which led some to gravitate toward the fringes of American society both left and right. John Rambo, for his part, did both. In First Blood (1982), Sylvester Stallone’s character is a ‘half-German, half-Indian’ veteran, traumatised by the war, who arrives in a small town to pay his respects to a black comrade killed by exposure to Agent ...”

“... first time in this country, when Rayner Heppenstall, together with his daughter, translated his major works into English and published a short study of him. That modest volume served Roussel’s cause far better than will the present translation of Foucault’s dispiritingly portentous essay of 1963, a lugubrious introduction to Roussel’s essentially ...”