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“... success. Thatcher’s government was able to satisfy enough of the electorate enough of the time: John Major paid the penalty. The present government has gone on about benefit fraud and claimed that cuts will stiffen the backbone of the poor, but it has primarily justified its policies on economic grounds, claiming that the private sector will pick up ...”

“... supra-national (Western) Europe. Has anything changed? Have the fall of Communism, the rise of John Major, and the passing of the war-time generation, made a difference? The average Briton is certainly more Europe-conscious than he was. I do not just mean in the consumption of microwave lasagne, which probably does not exceed that of the toned-down ...”

“... what you can, control what you can’t,’ has proved congenial for different reasons to John Major and Tony Blair, and to Blair’s heir apparent, Gordon Brown. These men are to Jenkins Thatcher’s political ‘sons’, with David Cameron trotting along behind as a ‘grandson’. (The book was completed before Cameron’s Conservatives ...”

“... to do without ‘misogynist satire, self-congratulation, smut’. He has left these to the other John, whose anthology is bold, noisy, rude, aggressive and full of itself, all of which things love can be, too, given half a chance. Neither editor is taking any chances, though. Fuller’s book, which has a long and elegant introductory essay, is an ...”

“... lightly but not altogether unselfconsciously. In World War Two a contemporary remembered Major Grimond, now a veteran of the Normandy campaign, ‘surrounded by people completely unlike himself so that he seemed a different animal, a noble beast in a farmyard’. He later corrected a television interviewer who called him ‘upper class’ by saying ...”

“... to the German Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens. Nor does Britain have an equivalent to John Tebbel’s multivolume history of American publishing. The student of the subject in this country (particularly if he is interested in contemporary matters) will find himself dredging through the pages of more or less hagiographic ‘house histories’ and ...”

“... face clamorous demands for political and economic reform from Ireland as well as the disarray of John Company in the Indian sub-continent. The victory of 1763 had been robbed of most of the, spoils. The theme of the next stage of Christie’s story is that of recovery, a recuperation largely explained by the resilience of the British economy and the ...”

“... When John Berryman’s first full-length collection of poems, The Dispossessed, was published in 1948, Yvor Winters wrote a notice of it for the Hudson Review. Here Winters drew attention to Berryman’s ‘disinclination to understand and discipline his emotions’, and went on to suggest: ‘Most of his poems appear to deal with a single all-inclusive topic: the desperate chaos, social, religious, philosophical and psychological, of modern life, and the corresponding chaos and desperation of John Berryman ...”

“... Peckham to Bermondsey in order to give it a more authentically working-class flavour (shades of John Major?). A generation earlier, H.G. Wells grew up in a basement kitchen with a mother as discontented as Steedman’s and Woodward’s, a mother who abandoned the domestic hearth, and forced her younger son out into the world as a draper’s apprentice ...”

“... myself understood, the more it becomes obvious that he will never escape condemnation, the thing John Major called for more of in his statement at the time of the trial. I have dreams about the boys, and sometimes dream I am the person in the CCTV footage who walks past them with a shopping bag at the exact moment they abducted James. I can see the ...”

“... and Jim Callaghan’s replacement of Rees at the Northern Ireland Office with Roy Mason marked a major change in policy. Mason treated Northern Ireland as a straightforward security problem and the IRA as common criminals. His policies led to a sharp reduction in violence, but tackled symptoms rather than underlying causes. The ‘long war’ had ...”

“... Sir John Junor made his reputation mainly as the man prepared to be more bitchy about famous people than any other newspaper columnist. This was the basis on which he conducted his column on the Sunday Express, the paper he also edited for 32 years, and which underpins its less successful appearance nowadays in the Mail on Sunday ...”

“... escape the matricidal trauma? An influential chorus of unreconstructed Tory journalists fingered John Major for ‘the ultimate crime of not being Margaret Thatcher’, and he became, in the words of the late Hugo Young, ‘a permanently contingent leader’. But he was not alone. Since Major no post-Thatcher Tory has ...”

“... Benn is fashionably unfashionable. The smoking classes have had no better champion since John Wayne. The nation’s youth have another icon on which to click. What makes his resuscitation the more beguiling is that New Labour’s project has been built on an emphatic rejection of Bennism. In 1981, backed by the hard Left in the unions and the ...”

“... and called and texted Tom Scholar, the permanent secretary at the Treasury. He also contacted John Glen and Jesse Norman, two MPs who had served under him and were now ministers in Sunak’s department.Despite Cameron’s efforts – and at least ten meetings with Treasury officials – Greensill wasn’t given access to the CCFF scheme, but it did ...”