“... he spoke, all the way down to the contraction of his eyebrows. In one sense, then, the fact that John Major’s father spent thirty years in music hall isn’t surprising. In another sense, it is as astounding as it would be to learn that Sir Peter Tapsell began his career as a plumber’s mate. ‘Whatever gifts my parents passed on to their ...”

“... all children over three years old, and the banning of corporal punishment (recommendations that took, respectively, twenty and thirty years to implement). When he was putting together the questionnaire for the 1958 cohort, Butler decided at the last minute to ask whether mothers had smoked during pregnancy. In 1950 Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill’s ...”

“... skyline and the French population as a whole fell under the sway of gigantism and gadgets. But as John Ardagh points out in the revised edition of France Today, when Mitterrand challenged Giscard d’Estaing in 1981, the confrontation was between a more traditional father-figure type of politician, a man who emphasised the private qualities of life and spoke ...”

“... trauma, breakdown came up more and more in her columns, and then the Guardian sacked her. I took to looking at her Twitter sometimes, and I saw grim stuff on it that I can’t check now, because a day or two after Deborah’s death her posts – ‘her support network and her playground,’ in the words of her great friend Suzanne Moore ...”

“... history. The chapter on CIA infiltration of the art world is riddled with howlers (that John Hay Whitney had his ‘own’ museum is one among several mistakes of this sort), but the gist of her argument about Abstract Expressionism and its uses as propaganda is correct, if not wholly original. Who Paid the Piper? is even so a major work of ...”

“... to know nothing of ‘the world’. ‘I am a child you know,’ he tells the young wards of John Jarndyce. ‘You are designing people compared with me.’ Skimpole’s main similarity to his real-life source, apart from a talent for accepting handouts, is his conversational manner, which is peculiarly fanciful, fluent and charming, but there are other ...”

“... view, a certain kind of ‘civilised’ (i.e. liberal) ideal has been replaced by its opposite – John Stuart Mill has turned into the Ayatollah. If Russell’s subtle consideration of disagreement was replaced by vacuous dogmatism, as Monk asserts it was – and everything he quotes in this book supports this contention – it may say as much about the ...”

“... First Family might constitute an offence against the ethos of the republic. Although only John F. Kennedy held the presidency, there were several attempts to restore the family to the office. JFK’s brother Robert was assassinated after his victory in the California Democratic primary in 1968. The immediate chances of a third brother, Senator Edward ...”

“... John Lloyd, currently the editor of the Financial Times Magazine, resigned as associate editor of the New Statesman in April 2003. His reasons for leaving were published in a ‘farewell article’, in which he criticised ‘a large part of the British Left’ for its opposition to the war in Iraq, described the Statesman as ‘a sort of upmarket version of the Daily Mirror’, and concluded that because ‘the NS believes that Blair and the US are the problem, not the solution,’ it was ‘time to recognise that Blairites like me should not appear regularly in its pages ...”

“... Pen, and join forces at North Berwick with his friends the Storys. Before starting, he had told John Forster that Pen and the Storys had persuaded him to this course, but that he meant to stay only a month. The friendship with the Storys was an old and affectionate one: they had met in Italy in 1848. William Wetmore Story was an American sculptor of ability ...”

“... the limp too, are long-standing: at art school, for no reason she understood at the time, she took up drawing feet. One such drawing is included in the catalogue: it shows three deformed feet labelled as belonging to Oedipus (of the swollen foot), Byron (with his club foot) and ‘Bootsy’ (a family friend, and Antigone’s godfather, nicknamed for the ...”

“... to his serviced chambers and the joys of independence. Nearby, a worthy Anglican cleric-to-be, John Egerton, was lodging in Lincoln’s Inn. He furnished his rooms with a rug, bureau, clock and piano, only to find that he had seemingly mislaid his fine and valuable linen sheets. After months of wrangling he became convinced that his housekeeper had stolen ...”

“... Cret, chair of the steering group of the American Battle Monuments Committee, told the architect, John Russell Pope, in 1925: ‘This is the most important monument and for this reason it has been entrusted to you.’ Pope was one of the most successful and visible American architects of the era – he designed the National Gallery in Washington, the ...”

“... Grave’. It leads to a blunt stone plinth with a round boulder on top and a plaque commemorating John Flynn (1880-1951), a Presbyterian minister who was sent by his church to the Northern Territory in 1912 to investigate conditions in the bush. His report was grim, describing poor communications and scant healthcare. In 1928, with the pedal-powered radio ...”

“... he hadn’t counted on how little one congressman (out of 435) could do. The speaker of the House, John Boehner, set the agenda, and Meadows was expected to do what he was told. ‘Boehner had “enforcers”, not unlike a Mafia don. If you didn’t vote how he wanted, these enforcers – most notably his leadership team – would ban you from congressional ...”