“... close of World War II. He attended Harvard, where he began a close friendship with his classmate, John Ashbery. After a year (1950-51) in Michigan writing and translating poetry, he moved to New York, where he rejoined his Harvard friends and their friends – among them the poets Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and Barbara Guest – becoming part of a social ...”

“... value even to more obscure items such as the Irish writer Thomas Amory’s picaresque Life of John Buncle and The Triumphs of God’s Revenge against the Crying and Execrable Sin of Murder, a popular collection of tales of murder and revenge by the 17th-century Exeter merchant whom Coleridge called ‘honest Murthereo-Maniacal ...”

“... It’s been two years since the last one, so it must be time for a new book of poems by John Ashbery. Like the old James Bond films, Ashbery’s late instalments arrive punctually, and you buy your ticket knowing what to expect: a suave cartoon with ridiculous gadgets, clever one-liners and last-minute escapes. ‘So Long, Santa’, the penultimate poem in Ashbery’s previous collection, A Worldly Country (2007), worried that ‘it will come round again/and we won’t be ready ...”

“... One of the more extraordinary revelations in A Better Class of Person, the first volume of John Osborne’s memoirs, was the fact that the author was proposed as the leading man in the 1948 film The Blue Lagoon. The teenage Osborne by his own account had a hollow chest and acne, and a loin cloth would not have shown these off to advantage; the opportunity to loll among the palms with Jean Simmons went to the Welsh actor Donald Houston ...”

“... Polish aberration in a general history of decency and good will. By contrast, I felt that Pope John Paul was the champion of the faith itself, the very faith which David Willey professes to believe, and that without such tactics as the Pope’s it is hard to see how Roman Catholicism can retain any plausible hold on its adherents. Take as an example the ...”

“... another high-toned writer, I started journalistic life on the Express, initially the Sunday in John Junor’s long days, then the Daily under Roy Wright. Beaverbrook had been dead by then for ten years. The amiable son, who touchingly refused the title in a spirit of unaffected and perhaps warranted humility, reigned rather than ruled in his place and was ...”

“... centrality in British culture. Characteristically feeble echoes of this assault were evident in John Major’s recent sneering at ‘progressive theorists’, but some years ago the real emotional dynamic was laid bare, indecently bare, by (as usual) Norman Tebbit, who extolled ‘the man in the pub’ against the upper-class ‘cocktail set’ on the ...”

“... James Waddell and others. Equally, as members of the Labour Delegation to the European Parliament, John Prescott and I were ‘educated in the ways of Upper Whitehall’ by Sir Thomas Brimelow, the former PUS at the Foreign Office, who became a Labour Peer and a British representative at Strasbourg. But it is no surprise to me that in over twenty years as an ...”

“... every ten years. Her book falls into three main periods, beginning with the German immigrant John Jacob Astor (1763-1848) who founded the family fortunes in the fur trade. Those engaged in it were prepared to suffer appalling physical hardship in the frozen North and to ruin the Indians and one another as opportunity arose. The first ...”

“... for those words at the day of judgment.’ The Reformation itself is tackled by Alistair Fox and John Guy. Alistair Fox, in the opening essays of the book, discusses Humanism, previously the main dues ex machina of the teleological interpretation of the Reformation. In his dissection of the notion that there is ‘one coherent thing called humanism’, Dr ...”

“... In this instance, the Bible as a book was an effective instrument of change. The Gospel of John puzzles Schniedewind, as it does most of us. ‘John’s own written work,’ he writes, ‘began by defining the true Word as a person, not a text: “In the beginning was the Word (...”

“... The Synges were landlord-class, with the mentality that went with such privilege. As a young man, John thought himself some kind of radical in a vaguely European sense. In Ireland, he knew that the real issue was the ownership of land. In 1893 he canvassed against Gladstone’s second Home Rule Bill on the grounds that it would exacerbate the question of land ...”

“... activity on the London literary scene that month, for at an institution in Lincoln’s Inn Fields John Thelwall was lecturing to a much less respectable audience on Shakespeare and Dr Johnson. It has become an orthodoxy of literary history that there was a phenomenon called ‘Romantic Shakespearean criticism’, that it was a way of reading which especially ...”

“... John Betjeman was the voice of postwar Englishness: at best, humorous, quirky and enthusiastic about some of the oddest things; at worst, parochial and smug shading into bitter. How ironic, in view of later developments and the argument of Timothy Mowl’s book, that Nikolaus Pevsner’s first visit to England, in 1930, was to research a new topic: Englishness in art ...”

“... On 16 October 1859, a white anti-slavery agitator called John Brown led 21 followers in a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. A previous expedition against a Kansas slave-owning settlement had ended in five deaths, but Brown had far grander hopes for his new enterprise – to start an insurrection across the South ...”