“... and teachers. Not since the publication of the central texts of the modern history of slavery, John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom in 1947 and Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution in 1956, has any serious history book claimed that slavery was a benign paternalistic institution. No one has argued that it was anything other than the great ...”

“... were indigenous, not borrowed from the Old World. At the turn of the century, on the other hand, John Singer Sargent had been a transatlantically renowned American painter with avowedly European artistic roots. Gorky admired his work – he even claimed to possess one of Sargent’s brushes – and was eager to take on the mantle of this quite incidentally ...”

“... in ‘7, Middagh Street’. 7, Middagh Street was the three-storey brownstone rented by George Davis – literary editor of Harper’s Bazaar at the time – and tenanted by Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten and Gypsy Rose Lee; shorter-term residents included Louis MacNeice, Auden’s lover Chester Kallman and Salvador Dali. The poem consists of a ...”

“... moment of his election to Parliament to the eventual achievement of his goal. One wonders whether John Major ever heard a similar message click-clacking from railway carriage wheels in the course of his extraordinary non-stop journey up the same greasy pole. There was scarcely time for him to form expectations during the interval that ran from his original ...”

“... New York journal on 18 February. This was not a new sentiment in the United States. In 1823 John Quincy Adams had suggested that ‘there are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation,’ so all New World Newtons ought to know what to do: if an apple, severed by the tempest from its native tree, cannot choose but fall to the ...”

“... of the great ‘samers’ of the later Middle Ages was the 14th-century travel writer known as Sir John Mandeville. Written close to home, somewhere in France, his vivid and readable travelogue is nonetheless animated by encounters with the unknown and unexpected: cyclopes, jewel-bearing vines, sheep the size of oxen, people who live under water and the ...”

“... finally, like a wine sauce, into an ultramontane oddity? Those vexed by the thought should turn to John Davis’s collection of historical essays, Gramsci and Italy’s Passive Revolution.4 It is concerned with aspects of Italy’s failed revolution, in both the 19th and the 20th centuries. Mr Davis’s lucid ...”

“... grand reopening, two of its former bosses filed conflicting accounts of its recent history. Both John Tooley (1970-88) and Jeremy Isaacs (1988-97) describe the House’s considerable achievements over the past half-century; and Isaacs’s part in pushing through the magnificent rebuilding was heroic. What we still want to know is why things also went so ...”

“... to have some justification. Yet it is rarely so obviously justified as in the case of Professor John Elliott’s rediscovery of a major Spanish statesman of the 17th century, the effective ruler of Spain for more than twenty years and the contemporary, the rival and the opponent of Cardinal Richelieu. A choleric man, obsessed with honour and reputation, it ...”

“... succeeded the popular hero Andrew Jackson in the White House. Who could become excited by John Tyler, Millard Fillmore or Franklin Pierce? The Senate chamber, by contrast, was inhabited by giants, notably the ‘great triumvirate’ of John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, as well as eloquent spokesmen on ...”

“... a dust-sheet over her first husband. Miss Edwards excellently takes it off. The second husband, John Marsh, was an advertising copywriter and a PR man. He read her epic carefully and, among many other things, took out the dashes. Gone with the Wind was written in a peculiar manner. It is, of course, very long, but epics are supposed to be. (Beckett’s ...”

“... was only about 10 per cent; and in their study of science fiction audiences, Henry Jenkins and John Tulloch note the continuing rejection of Star Trek by ‘the male establishment of literary science fiction fandom’. Actually, no group of fans can be called an establishment: none of them has any power at all, not even, for all the write-in ...”

“... and bypassing civil service rules on appointments. (Coincidentally, her husband, the Tory MP John Penrose, is Johnson’s official ‘anti-corruption champion’.) The National Institute for Health Protection is a very Johnsonian creation: combining NHS Test and Trace with Public Health England, it was designed by the management consulting firm McKinsey ...”

“... Dollar bills, pound notes, they’re suicide notes. Money is a suicide note.’ So says John Self, the hero of Money: A Suicide Note, and what he means is that money is destroying him. Self-destruction (along with several of its hyphenated pals: indulgence, interest, loathing) has become Self’s hobby, what he does in his spare time, and what he spends his money on ...”

“... John Wieners​ once told his nephew he had met the Virgin Mary. ‘Did she say anything to you?’ Walter asked. ‘No,’ John said, ‘she doesn’t know how to speak.’ He paused. ‘But she’s learning.’ Wieners was born to a working-class family outside Boston in 1934, educated by Jesuits, and spent formative periods of his youth in New York, San Francisco and Black Mountain, North Carolina ...”