“... called the Angry Brigade, the language of whose communiqués (identified by a stamp made from a John Bull printing set) led the Met Bomb Squad to Ian Purdie and Jake Prescott (the former a left-wing activist, previously convicted for throwing a petrol bomb at the Ulster Office during a demonstration; the latter a drug-user and small-time criminal who’d ...”

“... his most celebrated poems were written from literal translations supplied by James Hardiman, John O’Donovan, Eugene O’Curry, John O’Daly, Edward Walsh, Samuel Ferguson and other sources. It is impossible to know how Mangan could have written so many poems and essays in a few years beset by ...”

“... is to do with its still shimmering quality. The film was an alchemical success: Frank Sinatra, John Frankenheimer, Angela Lansbury and Laurence Harvey would never better their performances here. ‘Something in the story, something in the times,’ Marcus writes, ‘that had to have been sensed, felt, but never thought out, never shaped into a theory or a ...”

“... to discern the state of religious life in the parishes. Local worthies sent reports to the bishop, John Trefnant, who processed through the diocese with a cadre of officials to investigate, judge and correct any troublesome behaviour. The visitation book, ‘an unsightly and tattered manuscript’, was discovered in the archives of Hereford Cathedral in ...”

“... symposium called ‘Science and Theological Imagination in Science Fiction’, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. (The event is not to be confused with Battlefield Earth, scientologist John Travolta’s sprawling film version of a story by high priest L. Ron Hubbard.) Tickets cost ...”

“... As John Berryman​ tells it, in a Paris Review interview conducted in 1970, he was walking to a bar in Minneapolis one evening in the mid-1950s with his second wife, Anne, the two of them joking back and forth, when Berryman volunteered that he ‘hated the name Mabel more than any other female name’. Anne decided Henry was the name she found ‘unbearable ...”

“... from the appearance of the new Oxford Middleton. Even as the blurb declares that Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino’s monumental collection is ‘based on the award-winning design of the Oxford Shakespeare’, the binding and dust jacket defiantly proclaim its difference from that distinguished model. The Shakespeare was bound in the press’s traditional ...”

“... On 21 December​ 1859 John Tyndall, a professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution, set out to measure the structure and movements of the Mer de Glace, a glacier above Chamonix. In previous summers he had collected data on several Alpine glaciers, but no one had ever attempted to do so in winter. He got to Folkestone but bad weather meant crossing the Channel was impossible and he returned to London ...”

“... numbers. If, in the process, it was discovered that the famous proof-text for the Trinity in I John was attested by almost no Greek manuscripts, though it existed in all Latin texts, manuscript and printed, what was to be done? It is, says modern scholarship, probably a late interpolation, designed to combat heretical denial of the doctrine. Leave it ...”

“... Sir Charles Worgan, a press baron, becomes the patron of a progressive theatre-manager, Holt St John. (Worgan also rather superbly patronises Oxford University, and receives an honorary doctorate for his efforts.) But Worgan soon falls out with St John, since he insists that art is an investment and that the theatre, like ...”

“... 1611 spelling, ornamental capitals beginning each chapter, a detailed map of Palestine engraved by John Speed (whose maps of English counties were selling so well at the time), a calendar of Church of England holy days and lessons for church services, and, strangest of all, 34 meticulously referenced genealogical tables of biblical characters culminating in ...”

“... cold seat in the privy, then they ought to be profoundly grateful to Elizabeth I’s godson Sir John Harington, who in his extraordinary pamphlet The Metamorphosis of Ajax (or ‘A Jakes’ – get it?) invented the flushing water closet. The s-bend was beyond Harington’s technological reach (his privy discharged via a valve directly into a vault ...”

“... bill and ‘coughs up $100,000’ for expenses. All the lesser characters echo his obsession. John Adams, the first vice-president, thought his salary (a quarter of the president’s) ‘a sort of "curiosity"’; it has not been recorded, Vidal writes, whether ‘Adams wept’ about his sorry financial condition. Vidal is tapping one of the trustiest ...”

“... never ceased to love her from that moment.’ The person who said that was known as Christopher St John, though her real name was Christabel Marshall. We know how she felt about the object of her passion, Vita Sackville-West, because she kept a ‘love-journal’ in Vita’s honour. Miss Sackville-West, who had recently (and most unusually) been abandoned by ...”

“... in The Tiger and the Rose; but he is evidently not quite satisfied with them. Turn for a moment to John Masters’s strangely similar novel, Man of War. It is an apologia for another sort of fighting man, a professional soldier. The hero, Dusty Miller, squeezes his way into the British Army during World War One, aged only 16; when World War Two comes ...”