“... the wealthy and unscrupulous entrepreneur Sir Jack Pitman imports and rebuilds all the major English tourist attractions on the Isle of Wight and opens up the island as a theme-park offering ‘Quality Leisure’ to wealthy American and Japanese tourists. Sir Jack, in the process, ends up rewriting English history, reproducing a new England in a ...”

“... odd fish?’ Severn also asked, and Crane’s book is an attempt to answer that question. Edward John Trelawny was born in 1792 and died in 1881. In his later years he was a legendary figure, farouche and craggy, a solitary survivor from an epoch which already seemed fabulously remote: here, living on deep into the later Victorian age was a man who had once ...”

“... Russians in Prague, Berlin and Paris. Almost overnight, Marina Tsvetaeva was recognised as a major literary figure. A poet of immense originality and versatility, in her mature work Tsvetaeva expanded the scope of Russian prosody and metrics. She had at her command an amazing range of poetic voices, dictions and styles which she used in her ...”

“... rights, who befriended mice as well as cats, but who cherished his old dog, the Reverend Doctor John Langborn; Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her spaniel Flush, immortalised by pet-lover Virginia Woolf; and so on. The significant point is that, more often than not, pets help humans to acquire ‘sympathetic tendencies’, as Locke insisted, and here the ...”

“... on the wall next to the bed. Back home, she initiates a correspondence under her pseudonym ‘John Ivy’, but the two never meet. Trewe kills himself, leaving a note in which he speaks of his yearning for the elusive woman of the dreams, the ‘imaginary woman’. Ella, too, pines away, and dies bearing the child she has conceived at Solentsea. Some ...”

“... organisation with anti-semitism and anti-Catholicism. Half a century later, Cobb County elected a John Bircher to Congress five times; it is now represented by Newt Gingrich. Although a 1967 Supreme Court decision finally overturned the Georgia state law that barred racial intermarriage, in 1986 the Supreme Court upheld a Georgia statute outlawing consensual ...”

“... of Crocodiles (1934) were recognised immediately: it received admiring notices and was awarded a major prize. Three years later it was followed by Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, which was published with Schulz’s illustrations to the text. These are reproduced in the present compendious volume, as are all his extant drawings and etchings. The ...”

“... camp personnel, Gestapo and police, or participants in the ‘euthanasia’ programme). No wonder John McCloy, the generally patient American High Commissioner, complained about the ‘abysmal ignorance’ displayed by many who wrote to him. Frei brings out very well the pathos that attached to incarcerated former members of the Wehrmacht, and the ...”

“... the Lion Woman’, ‘Chang the Chinese Giant’, ‘Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy’ and John Merrick, the ‘Elephant Man’. But by the turn of the century, the mood of the public had changed and the public display of such ‘human prodigies’ – as they preferred to be called – had become unacceptable in many countries. The profession of ...”

“... in Fallujah are becoming more confident. In one attack in February they almost killed General John Abizaid, the US Middle East commander, and in another they overran the police headquarters, killing some twenty men. The soldiers in the specialised units of the 82nd Airborne Division sound a little perplexed by the sort of war they are fighting. At a base ...”

“... narratives and the Book of Acts took shape and found readers. By the end of the reign of Domitian, John had composed the Book of Revelation and targeted the Whore of Babylon. The Flavian house of Vespasian made serious efforts to counteract the disastrous impact of Titus’ victory on relations with Jews, not least by setting up Josephus safely in Rome as he ...”

“... of Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. Only slowly over the decades was this exciting approach to reading a major religious text replaced by more academic strategies. (I comprehensively failed all parts of the exam to become any kind of saint.) The context in which one reads the Koran and the expectations one brings to that reading are crucial to one’s understanding ...”

“... Iraqis were killed in March. American politicians ran for cover. While I was in Baghdad in March, John McCain visited, at the same time as Dick Cheney. Both expressed confidence that security was improving. McCain told CNN that Muqtada’s ‘influence has been on the wane for a long time’. Two weeks later, he denied he had ever said such a thing; what he ...”

“... Cook, scientific director of the Grapple test series; some recent disclosures on the part of John Ward, who was employed at the British nuclear weapons laboratory at Aldermaston for six months during 1955; and a group of declassified US documents obtained by Robert Norris of the Natural Resources Defence Council in Washington. It may well be that there ...”

“... more extraordinary that armed forces maintain impetus to attack despite heavy casualty rates. John Terraine’s The Right of the Line, a comprehensive, judicious and humane account of the RAF’s experience in the last European war, gives sympathetic attention to the stress experienced by aircrews in Bomber Command, which realised as time went on that men ...”