“... might have herself planned the poisoning of a prominent courtier was unthinkable.’ So Forman took the blame, and at the trial and afterwards was vilified as a necromancer and charlatan. This will not do at all. In the 15th century it was absolutely normal for women of the high aristocracy to be accused of murdering personal or political enemies by ...”

“... crawling on our bellies a thousand feet below ground and we saw how the poor buggers lived. It took a lot of tea to get the dust out of our throats. The filming was good. We were all just first-timers doing our thing. He had such an analytical brain – I don’t want to say un-English, but he was persistent. As well as all that he had such a suave ability ...”

“... moral outlook, a rejection of traditional religious beliefs. Quite incongruously, Fitz’s poem took off in this company, its epicureanism given a new look by Eastern colours which also give the poem a daring, even sexy quality, the hint of a new sort of voluptuousness behind the veils, moons and roses. In the traditional rubai that Omar and others were ...”

“... early inspirations to ‘a willowy Wren’ who ‘recognised the bracken where we stood ... and took “argute” on trust’. It is Larkin bracken, and also points towards those tall fronds on the heath near Bockhampton where Hardy as a child sat and pondered his intellectual future. But as well as these English inspirations – Cambridge, Barnsley, the ...”

“... the phrases of the Anglican liturgy function as patent jargon. With entertaining animus, he also took a stick to the near and would-be professions, arguing that the lexicons of the established professions (‘defrocking’, ‘disbarring’, ‘striking off’, ‘cashiering’) deserved more respect than those of the aspirant professions (from academia to ...”

“... eat. How many of us who know that milk is pasteurised have also heard of the ingenious Irishman, John Tyndall, who in the 1870s discovered that mother bacteria are destroyed by heating food or milk, but that their offspring survive? These sturdy youngsters have had their powers of resistance much reduced, however, so that they succumb to an ensuing bout of ...”

“... involved with him for fear of censorship on moral or political grounds. One future bishop called John Personne, the author of Strindbergian Literature and Immorality among Schoolchildren, blamed Strindberg for masturbation among the young. The Bonniers’ business suffered from publishing him and the subsequent rejections fed Strindberg’s ...”

“... different style. I’d never heard anything like it,’ Count Basie said. In time he employed her. John Hammond, the pioneering record producer who ‘discovered’ Holiday, said: she ‘changed my musical tastes and my music life’; she ‘sang like an improvising jazz genius’. ‘I don’t think I’m singing. I feel like I’m playing a horn. I try to ...”

“... At the start​ of the war, John Piper – who had made his name as an avatar of high abstraction in the mode of Braque and Mondrian, his paintings hanging among the Giacomettis and Calders in the seminal 1936 show Abstract and Concrete – was struggling to get by. His pictures weren’t really selling, and he was living on the £3 10s a week he still got from his mother ...”

“... that if something is believed in or wanted for long enough, it will eventually materialise. From John Aubrey’s passing remark in 1665 that Stonehenge might have been built by druids, through William Stukeley’s obsessively detailed and almost entirely invented account of the druidic religion it took another hundred and ...”

“... 2012, Pallant House Gallery in Chichester put on an exhibition of works by the painters Gwen John and Celia Paul. What now seems obvious was then inspired. The comparison diminished neither. Two artists, distinct but in obvious affinity, spoke across their different periods and each made the other more necessary, more triumphant. It was as though ...”

“... forty-eight, we argued all         night about whether a poem was good enough for us. John         Ashbery sat in a corner shelling pistachio nuts;         Robert E. Bly wore a three- piece suit and a striped tie; Kenneth         Koch was always sarcastic. Once as we pasted an issue         together we discovered a ...”

“... always turn parody into new reality and the Gothic into his own version of the electrically banal. John Jones may be right to write off The Idiot in his study and leave it out of discussion. Even its humour is disproportionate, and it is peculiarly difficult to separate in it the essential from the inessential, the blind alley (Myshkin) from the continuing ...”

“... information. He was acquitted. Frolik also named a Labour minister, the postmaster general, John Stonehouse – who, he said, had been recruited in the late 1950s after being compromised by a homosexual honeytrap on a trip to Prague. Instead of having Stonehouse prosecuted, Harold Wilson asked him to the Number Ten sitting room for a chat. The prime ...”

“... was an insight that could occur only to someone thoroughly marinated in academic ways of thinking. John Battelle, an internet-world insider and search-engine specialist, gives a fascinating account of it in his indispensable book The Search. Page was fooling around at Stanford, trying to come up with an idea for his PhD thesis. He had always been interested in ...”