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“... Among the illustrations in this book is a painting by John Closterman of the Marlborough family which hangs today in Blenheim Palace. On its right-hand side, as convention dictates, sits the head of the family, John Churchill, at the time of the painting, first Earl of Marlborough ...”

“... nurtured; some of these friends, notably the Earl of Oxford and the Queen’s physician, Dr John Arbuthnot, helped protect him from his detractors. After Pope’s death, he found friends among writers who could not have known him. Samuel Johnson’s Life (1781), though often dismissive of poems we now value, strongly countered Warton’s general ...”

“... barn-like structure, set – in 1952 at least – in several acres of woodland. Water Music by John Cage, a Californian composer whose recent work had been feted in New York, opened the programme and baffled its audience. It involved Tudor performing various actions at seemingly random intervals: blowing a duck-call, tuning a radio, shuffling and dealing ...”

“... taken. Then the Troubles flared up again; and the IRA bombing campaign came to the mainland; and John McGrath wrote The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil; and suddenly it was 1974, and there were two close-run general elections, and not only did the Ulster Unionists matter even in England, but so did a couple of hitherto obscure and eccentric ...”

“... ushered into a large hall containing about a hundred people … Many of the inhabitants underwent major brain operations, and consequently many were shaven-headed. Others were swathed in bandages and were disfigured by post-operative bruises and black eyes.The patients were dressed in hospital-issue clothing and had no personal possessions. I wondered where ...”

“... and Ravensbrück; plenty of Goya, Seurat, Manet; Kim Novak almost drowning in Vertigo, the old major dying in The Magnificent Ambersons; Ivan the Terrible and Stalin; Hitler in one frame immediately followed by James Stewart in another, focusing his camera in Rear Window; an extraordinary bit of cross-cutting between a dance scene in An American in Paris ...”

“... writes, ‘dances like Salomé’ between Picasso and Rousseau, with Picasso as art’s ‘new John the Baptist’ and Rousseau a ‘sentimental Herod’.The Barnes show attempts to free Laurencin from such patronising comparisons. It is the fourth in the foundation’s series of exhibitions on female French modernists, which began with Berthe Morisot in ...”

“... exhausted on their behalf in the French and Indian War. In his 1763 proclamation, George III made major concessions to Indian tribes and declared the Appalachian mountain range to be the outer limit of colonial expansion. For trigger-happy real estate speculators like George Washington, who had ignited the French and Indian War with an ill-planned attack on ...”

“... capital sniffing out the news. Writers like H. R. Knickerbocker, Malcolm Muggeridge, Eugene Lyons, John Gunther and Walter Duranty were our eyes and cars in the world. The milieux in which these men functioned in the Twenties and Thirties were turbulent and romantic. Moving constantly between Paris, Berlin and Moscow, they knew each other; they frequented the ...”

“... after all, interesting in their own right. The plot sometimes creaks, though no more loudly than John Spurling’s The Ragged End or Ben Elton’s eco-farce Stark. These books try for the global range and include by reference and implication huge volumes of contemporary history. Stories which bring in two world wars or the coming eco-crisis or the sunset of ...”

“... contributed to a no-nonsense, suck-it-and-see anti-intellectualism. For socialist playwrights like John Arden and Edward Bond, the consequence, in one case, is external and in the other a form of internal exile. But the most noted instance of the prophet rejecting his own country is the director Peter Brook who, having forged a glittering career in the British ...”

“... movements played a part in such political insurgency as the Bambata rebellion of 1906 and John Chilembwe’s Nyasaland rising of 1915. Meanwhile, intellectuals like Blyden and the Ghanaian Casely Hayford were able to draw on Homer and the myth of Prester John to build the term into a symbol of ...”

“... principles were more influential than his practice. Although his short memoir of his friend John Sterling is counted as a minor classic of biography, his much more elaborate life of Cromwell, not to say his interminable History of Frederick the Great, has never been shortlisted among the world’s greatest examples of the art. But Carlyle possessed one ...”

“... culture of the Scottish Enlightenment which Madison acquired at Princeton from the teaching of John Witherspoon. Professor Garry Wills has now followed Adair and extended his thesis in producing an interpretation of Madison in which the Scottish influence on him has a central place. Wills’s earlier book Inventing America perhaps overstated the case for ...”

“... This went badly awry. ‘If a noble family cannot rebuild their own castle,’ thundered John Ruskin, ‘in God’s name let them live in the nearest ditch till they can.’ The popular view that stately homes were part of the national heritage was now challenged by the Radical view that they were the national heritage, wrongly appropriated. With an ...”