“... from procuring slaves for New Spain to Arctic whaling. (In a similar way, the Darien Company and John Law’s Mississippi Company had seduced the Scottish and French states into backing failed colonies.) The ‘Bubble Act’ of 1720 neither prevented the bursting of the South Sea Company’s bubble when its overvalued shares collapsed in price nor stopped ...”

“... of Edinburgh begs his father, the mountain god Kalbaben, to let him go off to war with his brother John Frum (Philip’s rival deity on Tanna, a god with American nationality). Baylis recognised the tale from his press packet, and was delighted to know that it had been passed on through generations to the Yaohnanen youth. But his elation was soon crushed by ...”

“... over the horizon, is set against their present predicament. Nor am I in the least convinced by John Arden’s ‘The Fork in the Head’, in which Fionnuala, an Irish Republican/Trotskyite activist, rushes off to a political meeting in Galway, leaving her disenchanted English husband, Jackson, to potter about the house and environs. He has a dream in which ...”

“... of years, when the people’s most elemental needs were in jeopardy, is minutely investigated by John Bohstedt. His method has been to scrutinise ‘an objective sample’ of the more than a thousand riots that broke out during 1790-1810, in order to discover how and why they occurred. They were too commonplace to be unduly upsetting, and it was rarely that ...”

“... John Norton-Griffiths, ‘Empire Jack’, engineer and strapping essence of imperial British manliness, was sent to Romania in 1916 to destroy that country’s oil industry before the Germans overran it. He had the Romanian government’s permission but local staff would occasionally try to interfere as he went at the oil wells with fire, dynamite and his personal sledgehammer ...”

“... rejection of the referendum outcome at its bubble party conference last September did them in. John McDonnell was right to take the blame for the defeat. His insistence on a second referendum was a huge strategic blunder.Johnson’s first speech as prime minister, delivered to the cameras outside Downing Street, was lucid and effective. This was not the ...”

“... member of the Vibrators she married) and Barry Reynolds. They worked together on a cover of John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’ and a wild setting of the poet Heathcote Williams’s ‘Why D’Ya Do It’, which was so full of expletives that the pressing plant and distributors initially refused to handle it. It was that track, and the title ...”

“... In​ ‘Dream Song 364’, quite close to the end of the sequence, John Berryman’s avatar/protagonist Henry is once more being remorselessly flattered. He has surely read everything there is to read. (One thinks of Mallarmé’s opening line from ‘Brise Marine’, ‘La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres ...”

“... years after the war – Quarto, Departure, the Window. Then, at a party in Kensington, given by John Lehmann and intimidatingly full of ‘famous faces’, he meets John Wain, who is editing a series of books of new poetry. Oakes’s first book of verse is published under the title, Unlucky Jonah. It is well reviewed. He ...”

“... of cancer eight months later but in the meantime some of the cells found their way to the lab of John and Margaret Gey of Johns Hopkins University. They were trying to find a method of keeping human cells dividing in a culture outside the body and had turned to cancer cells for their ability to divide essentially unchecked. These particular cells, named HeLa ...”

“... of the high-minded Germans, but liberty as the right to be cussedly, bloody-mindedly oneself. ‘John is John,’ as Tony Blair wryly murmured of John Prescott when he punched a demonstrator, suggests something of this tautological quality. This brand of liberty is not in principle ...”

“... the while; the car-bomb attacks on the West End of London and Glasgow airport and have-a-go hero John Smeaton’s assault on one of the bombers; the floods that put large parts of Yorkshire and the Midlands under water; the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Portugal. The narrator starts the book as an ‘I’. Later, a ‘he’ appears who, it gradually ...”

“... the 1790s (which included a letter from Elizabeth I thanking him for his ‘prettye Verses’) and John Payne Collier in the 1830s and 1840s (which showed Shakespeare to have been a well-connected member of metropolitan literary circles from an early stage). But for Shapiro the real villain is Edmond Malone. The usual story is that Malone, as he himself ...”

“... triumph of a perverted and endlessly corrupting liberalism’. After a drive-by shooting of John Rawls (‘he had no convincing vision of the good society or the good life’), and a wildly constructive misreading of Rawls’s famous ‘veil of ignorance’, Blond ties himself in verbal knots as he tries to assert that the liberal state is destined to ...”

“... a few unrighteous men (contrary to the deluge),’ Pope, who lost money himself, was to write. John Gay was ruined, and in a letter written weeks after prices crashed, explains that he can’t settle his book-buying bill ‘at a time when it is impractible to sell out of the Stocks in which my fortune is engag’d’. How Tonson must have chuckled. He ...”