“... a kind of 24-hour coverage in case there was ‘anything that can be done’. He sent a letter to John Lanchester dated ‘Christmas Eve, 2000’. Lanchester eventually met Silvers in London. ‘He’d flown in on the red-eye,’ John told me, ‘was doing this dinner at the Ivy, then spending the whole next day at the ...”

“... aspired to the throne and, ‘stimulated by ambition and revenge’, plotted to murder her brother John in order to seize it. When her plans were foiled, the guilty princess tried to console herself with writing, but her history ‘betrays in every page the vanity of a female author’ (male authors apparently being exempt from that vice). Subsequent ...”

“... Both here and in his earlier study of the Edinburgh Review and his first volume on Macaulay, John Clive shows no desire to use or manipulate the Victorians. He merely wants to understand them better. And what he comes to understand, as G.M. Young did before him, is that the Victorian resolutely refuses to behave in the way we think Victorians ...”

“... Mrs Thatcher herself was dumped in 1990 and the personal style of government transformed by John Major, there has yet – apart from a very different attitude towards Europe – been any significant change in the conduct of economic and social policy or in the intention behind it. The collection of books and papers under review, most of which ...”

“... takes centre stage for a time – displaced by other violent attention-getters like Lorena and John Wayne Bobbitt, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, Singapore’s caning sentence to punish an American teenager, the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ Congressional proposal to jail for life those convicted of three violent crimes (a category that includes ...”

“... years. Soloists with the chorus of praise have been distinguished and influential: Peter Porter, John Carey, John Bayley – and Raine himself has by no means been indisposed with laryngitis. His position in literary journalism and his access to the popularising media have played their part in his promotion. And the result ...”

“... didn’t realise he was wearing track-suit trousers.’ The jester here was Ian St John, who from the very start has worn the air of a man who has been given a bum posting – his Group having, in the main, gone in for timid goalless draws. Sad, this, because St John is one of the few ‘experts’ who really ...”

“... after 1860 and especially in the years after 1870.’ But this statement is from the foreword to John Ruskin: The Early Years, 1819-1859 – the only volume so far issued. The general judgment seems to me to be right. What might meanwhile be useful is to reflect on the changing perceptions of Ruskin, from the vantage-point of this latest and evidently ...”

“... examples by leading practitioners such as Nicholas Hilliard (b.1547), Isaac Oliver (b.1565), John Hoskins the Elder (b.1590), Samuel Cooper (b.1609), Richard Cosway (b.1742), John Smart (b.1741) and George Engleheart (b.1750).Miniatures pose many curatorial challenges. These are objects which were designed to be held ...”

“... of such nationalists: but it is the occasional gringo heretic – like the muckraking journalist John Kenneth Turner who, in 1909, blew the whistle on Mexican neo-slavery, alleging that his compatriots had ‘transformed Mexico into a slave colony of the US’ – who has often made the biggest impact. Such auto-critiques carry special weight; they exude ...”

“... the images for an article on the neo-romantic insularity of such artists as Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Leslie Hurry and Keith Vaughan, committed at that time to fervid inkiness and illustrational hypertension. The article went down well. (Cyril Connolly was nice about it in the Sunday Times lift.) Bacon will have found that he went unmentioned (not a ...”

“... draughtsman whose main income came from rendering the designs of others, or rather of one other: John Soane, who first employed him as a draughtsman and later gave him individual commissions and other financial support. He seems to have been difficult and touchy. He had trouble making enough money to keep himself and a large family, and died ...”

“... Godot. Maybe this time he shows up.Yitzhak Laor lives in Tel Aviv. He is the editor of Mita’am. John Mearsheimer The Gaza war is not going to change relations between Israel and the Palestinians in any meaningful way. Instead, the conflict is likely to get worse in the years ahead. Israel will build more settlements and roads in the West Bank and the ...”

“... both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen.’ One can’t imagine Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy saying such a thing, or wanting to say it. They had known ‘those guys’ all their lives and felt no tingle of reflected glory. Obama has not yet recognised that his conspicuous relish of his place among the elite does him two kinds of harm: it ...”

“... The engraved frontispiece​ to the 1635 second edition of John Donne’s Poems features a portrait of the artist as an exceedingly young man. Eighteen years old, in loose curls, padded Italian doublet, a single cross-shaped earring and the optimistic hint of a moustache, Donne clutches an oversized sword by the hilt and gazes sidelong at the viewer from beneath provocatively arched brows, a study in adolescent bravado ...”