“... and things like that. I like first-person music.’ We didn’t enjoy hearing this in 1970, when John Lennon said it in the course of Jann Wenner’s ‘Rolling Stone’ Interviews. It was bad enough that Lennon had left the beloved Beatles to work with a Japanese-born conceptual artist, living in beds and bags and producing minimalist packages of ...”

“... more than seventy years in this hard world, comes before it as an optimist? The handsome head of John Redcliffe-Maud, alias Sir John Maud, GCB, CBE and what else, alias Baron of the City and County of Bristol, looks from the dust-cover with a questioning half-smile. In his Bath robes? Not a bath-robe, anyway, though it ...”

“... pleasant opportunity to tell people twice their age what to do. At the time when the undergraduate John Henry Newman was delighting in the inexhaustible metaphorical riches of Aeschylus at Oxford, the students of Maynooth were being fed a philistine diet of papist apologetics and garbled chunks of scholasticism. It was well nigh impossible, given this dismal ...”

“... The dust jacket of the final volume of Bevis Hillier’s epic life of John Betjeman shows the poet laureate seized by giggles. In this lengthy coda to Hillier’s authorised biography Betjeman appears in many lights, but he’s rarely carefree. ‘Nothing frightens me more than the thought of dying,’ he told a friend in 1958 ...”

“... English housing and town planning. In other English buildings the influence is direct. Colin St John Wilson was a friend and admirer. Sources for the steep roofs, the vertical accent (the clock tower), the plain brick walls, wave-profiles in entrance hall ceilings and the careful modulation of light in the reading rooms of his British Library can be found ...”

“... with the elderly gentleman beside me. He had a lot to say about herbaceous borders. He was John Profumo. But I didn’t know it was him until the end: helping him on with his coat, I saw a little nametag. He liked talking to Denis and they seemed to have things in common.We can now say a bit more about that, thanks to the third volume of Charles ...”

“... thinks of his montages as sentences. The impression is that each work says one thing and one only. John Berger wrote of Kennard: ‘I would say his work was pure – if the word hadn’t become dirty.’Archive of Dissent, an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery (until 19 January), complicates the idea of Kennard’s work as univocal and determined. As a ...”

“... reposed in Jesus-Colledge’ – but left the publishers alone. In the mid and late 17th century, John Hayes and the entrepreneur John Field, whose Bibles were so inaccurate that he was later suspected of taking bribes to alter the text in Acts, worked in relative harmony with the Stationers, collaborating with London ...”

“... and sculpture undermined art’s humanity. ‘Painting is made out of a love for the subject,’ John Minton repeatedly told his students at the Royal College of Art, in defiance of an abstract tradition that had resurfaced with Victor Pasmore’s 1948 abstracts. Pasmore became a leading member of the Constructionists: abstract artists who abandoned nature ...”

“... The nice thing about John Buchan is that he was on the side of books. He thought, it is true, that he ought to have been a Guardian, shaping the Empire, or dominating Cabinets, or, at worst, ‘a power behind the throne’. However, after his spell in Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’, the nation didn’t seem to want him in the Guardian line, so he did the next best thing and became an entertainer ...”

“... which to fashion it lie ready to hand with the completion of the text of the Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. Now that we have Volumes XI and XII, dealing with his more technical activities as an economist, only the index volume remains to be published, as the coping stone of a notable editorial enterprise. It is very gratifying that Sir Austin ...”

“... great credit to the publishers. This particular essay has provoked in another attentive reader, John Lucas (LRB, Vol. 5, No 20), the reflection that ‘language cannot be innocent.’ But surely it needs to be remarked that whereas indeed the British English that Hill and Lucas share cannot be in this sense ‘innocent’, that doesn’t necessarily hold ...”

“... Lord Northcliffe and the editor of Tit-Bits at its head. There had rapidly come into being what John Carey describes as ‘an alternative culture which bypassed the intellectual and made him redundant’. It was a culture that used itself up as it went along, but its audience could be numbered in millions and the delights it provided were not all that easy ...”

“... Sir John Low​ finally hung up his helmet seventy years after joining the Madras army in 1804, having served the East India Company as soldier, jailer, agent and councillor. As a rookie lieutenant, his regiment mopped up in Mysore when the British took over the old kingdom of Tipu Sultan. He helped see off the Marathas at the battle of Mahidpur in 1817, and kept their chief minister, Baji Rao, under house arrest on the banks of the Ganges ...”

“... Rain drummed on the roof, the roof leaked, as inside the people were watching The Perfect Storm. John Love, who is a fund of such stories, also told us about a Grimsay fisherman who was alone at sea when he somehow had his arm ripped off. With the other arm, he managed to up the anchor, sail himself home, land and collapse on the slipway, where he was found ...”