“... ever met McCorvey; ‘Jane Roe’ was just a common pseudonym for a woman in legal proceedings, as John Roe (sometimes Poe, Doe or Hoe) was for a man. Coffee would probably have continued to work on the case by herself if she hadn’t received a phone call from her old law school classmate Sarah Weddington. They weren’t friends, but Weddington had a question ...”

“... before leaving the town: ‘This is to give notice to all the World that Andrew Tucker and his son John Tucker are Clowns, and Cowards.’ It is his earliest extant manuscript, and is reproduced here along with the portrait of Sarah Andrew. Such episodes, taken from local archives and legal records, are among the best things in the book, though part of the ...”

“... counsels of princely crime, but in his equable observation of contrasting civic and Christian virtues. The only evidence for this claim, abundantly disproved by centuries of polemic, is the autobiographical illumination Berlin reports in these pages – the intellectual discovery he himself made on reading Machiavelli. In such ...”

“... land can be sold to the Jews without dispossessing Arab cultivators,’ the High Commissioner, Sir John Chancellor, wrote to George V in 1930. ‘Only in a very few places in our colonisation,’ Ben Gurion said at a Zionist Congress in 1937, ‘were we not forced to transfer the earlier residents.’ Clearly, Israel’s first Prime Minister did not think that ...”

“... Fisher’s book as New English Grammar, which was in fact the title of a work by the enterprising John Kirkby, who almost certainly plagiarised Fisher’s book for his own. It was Kirkby rather than Fisher who was long given the dubious honour of being the first grammarian to claim that indefinite nouns are referred to with the pronoun ‘he’. The true ...”

“... of the term suddenly soared in the late 1990s, multiplying sixty times over and becoming, as John Gillingham, an economic historian attached to its earlier sense, remarked, ‘the current euphemism for overthrowing foreign governments’.Yet the relevance of its original meaning remains. Neoliberalism has not gone away. Its hallmarks are now ...”

“... playfulness’, a habit characterised rather more severely by a friendly critic of Forster, John Beer, who remarks that language of this sort may war against the ‘serious point’. In an essay called ‘Word-Making and Sound-Taking’, Forster discusses some remarks of the novelist-potter William de Morgan on ‘a tune by Beethoven’, apparently from ...”

“... years and to deploy 6000 National Guard along the length of the frontier. The bill is sponsored by John McCain (Arizona), who, like George W. Bush, was once an immigration liberal but sees where the votes have come to lie in recent years. Two highly visible protagonists in the immigration drama, Salvador Reza and the Republican state senator, Russell ...”

“... country house in which he is seated on the lawn as one of an assorted company, including John Strachey, Harold Nicolson, Peter Howard and Professor Joad, of prospective Parliamentary candidates. Three years later, when Mosley was starting to move towards Fascism, there were some letters, which are extant, in which my father sought reassurance from ...”

“... criminal instincts? Was Christ the lover of Mary Magdalene, and if so, does that mean that the Christian religion is sexually split between a hidden feminine pole and a dominant masculine one?    Has France become decadent? Are you for Spinoza, Darwin, Galileo, or against? Are you partial to the United States? Wasn’t Heidegger a Nazi? Was Michel ...”

“... remarking that his ‘vocabulary and syntax are those of utmost abstention from waste’. John Updike referred to ‘the stirring purity’ of Kafka’s prose. Hannah Arendt, as well, wrote that his work ‘speaks the purest German prose of the century’. So although Kafka was certainly Czech, it seems that fact is superseded by his written ...”

“... Yet he, too, makes of the poet what the title of one of his book’s most appreciative reviews, John Carey’s, called ‘The Hollow Man’. Moreover this is not, in Ackroyd’s case, a mere technicality, an unfortunate function of the concept of biography as necessarily external. His Life firmly presents Eliot as characterised by an essential emptiness at ...”

“... be found wicked – then from that much farther back again through the rule of Islam to the early Christian centuries within a deliquescent Roman culture, with Augustine’s war on the world’s virtues as merely ‘splendid vices’; and from that back again to Greek and, above all, Judaic idealism, an austere and fierce feeling for absolutes. It’s not my ...”

“... Oxford who caused him concern’: he believed him to be his illegitimate brother. Her grandfather John Horatio Lloyd had, in the 1830s, ‘exposed himself in the Temple Gardens’ and run ‘naked in the sight of some nursemaids’, thus losing the opportunity to become solicitor-general. He ‘was forced to retire from political and legal work for four ...”

“... and to be admired for it, whatever the scriptural accuracy of their treatments of Christian or other holy writ. But religion – in nominalist mood, he sometimes doubts whether the term has any constructive meaning at all – is one thing, the church another. Towards the institution responsible for the Inquisition, and a Vatican whose power ...”