“... To many of these words it is necessary to respond. With deliberate gravity, so as to impress John, with whom I share an office, and who almost wrecked the whole teletext system by using his shaver from the adjoining socket, I move the teletext out of ‘answerback’ and into ‘send’. John and I debate on how to ...”

“... Ireland Renaissance’ is ‘largely a journalistic entity’. Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Deane, Michael Longley and their colleagues are from the North, and they are poets: but they are individual poets, not a school. They are not even two rival schools, though some of them have started fabricating a ...”

“... John Robert Seeley was Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge between Kingsley and Acton. One of the few eminent Victorians who inspired no memorial biography, he was best remembered as the author of The Expansion of England (1883), a sweeping historical manifesto in favour of the unification of the British Empire ...”

“... It seems safe to infer from his now majestically large oeuvre that John Updike’s ultimate ambition is to get the whole of America, its geography as well as its history, the fluctuations of its spiritual as well as of its material wellbeing, into his books. The contribution of the four Rabbit volumes to the realisation of this plan (one volume per decade since 1960) is easily recognised, but many other novels, though less clearly devoted to the annotation of historical change, have a similar purpose ...”

“... action, as cringing as it is brave. In Henry IV, it is the women who speak the truth: ‘No, Sir John,’ Mistress Quickly says to Falstaff when he insists he knows she has been hostess to petty crime. ‘You do not know me, Sir John; I know you, Sir John.’ As with Lady Percy, it is ...”

“... of the material is drawn from the canonical gospels of Matthew and Luke, with Mark behind them and John ignoring them. They offer accounts of the infancy of Jesus that are often quite wildly at odds with one another, but anyone wanting to retell the tale can pick and choose, ignoring conflicts of testimony and adding more if desired. It does not bother many ...”

“... drew his coloured strata directly onto a base map, made in 1794 by his publisher, the cartographer John Cary, before the fifteen sheets were engraved by assist­ants onto copper plates ready for reprinting – a process that took two years. He made several versions of the map during his lifetime, many of which he neither ...”

“... of the Washington Post, but it never occurred to him that he could actually close the paper. John F. Kennedy took a different tack, mugging up on things that individual journalists might like to be praised about. He understood writers’ egos, and major hacks visiting the White House would be greeted by JFK as if they ...”

“... a chilling subject-matter fixed with a steady eye, The Witches of Eastwick through the potency of John Updike’s imaginative release. On the Perimeter records what Caroline Blackwood found at Greenham Common and in the town of Newbury, when she visited the nuclear protest encampments there in March this year, shortly before the town council attempted to ...”

“... whether to introduce ‘some bursts of fine writing’, an indulgence best left to Viceroys. John Keay, the drily witty author of Travellers Extraordinary (and, earlier, Eccentric Travellers), comes as a timely model of concision. His heroes are the coxcombs and humbugs of travel, or pretended travel. The best-known is Louis de Rougemont, alias Henry ...”

“... location (a database, a book, the brain of a teacher) to another. Reading English at Oxford with John Bayley had been more like learning to build boats on the river Xingu. There was no obvious method in the way John Bayley taught, and no manipulation. I suspect that being a teacher did not interest him. Talking to people ...”

“... Mellon Centre in London, which has now published it as this Dictionary, under the editorship of John Ingamells. The Dictionary is unique in its comprehensiveness. No traveller from the British Isles or the British colonies in America who was spotted anywhere in Italy has been omitted, even if no more than his or her surname is known. The Mellon Centre’s ...”

“... married women could not. At a time when spinsters were barred from most crafts and trades, they took advantage of the few rights they had, and participated widely in credit markets: only the scale of Jeffreys’s investments was unusual. In any case, in early modern England, where financial and social credit were practically synonymous, wealth could lift ...”

“... lost his mother. Francis Pym said, ‘Guns fire from Number 10’ on the Sarah Kennedy show. I took this to mean the PM had given the order to sink the Belgrano. But Mr Pym was speaking in a different context. Paul Daniels, who was also a guest, said: ‘Something strange is going to happen.’ From that day on all the radio and TV channels seemed to be ...”

“... reported the home visit. James explained that he had no idea whom he should inform. The major took the point, and asked some questions about James’s Party membership. Finally he inquired: ‘Are you for Stalin or for us?’ James truthfully answered: ‘For us, sir.’ ‘Shake on it, old man’ was the reply. ‘For the rest of the war, no secrets were ...”