“... promises of the New Testament – ‘If ye shall ask anything in my name, I will give it’ (John 14) – seemed not to be a promise. Faith might move mountains, but in an invisible mountain range. And I noticed that when people were speaking in tongues, instead of producing a nonsense version of English, they seemed to produce a tourist’s imitation of ...”

“... with some interesting annotations. These annotations, I can now reveal, are in the hand of Sir John Puckering, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. This is a new fact, though not a surprising one. Puckering took a particular interest in what we might today call ‘state security’, and together with another high-ranking court official and Privy ...”

“... were received. In keeping with his own desire to suppress authorship and to invite indeterminacy, John Cage called the White Paintings ‘airports’ for ambient accidents of light, shadow and dust. ‘If one were sensitive enough that you could read [them],’ Rauschenberg added, ‘you would know how many people were in the room, what time it was, and what ...”

“... History Reader privileges empirical case studies over theoretical generalisation, omitting the John Sutherland who composed the polemic ‘Publishing History: A Hole at the Centre of Literary Sociology’ in favor of the John Sutherland who compiled ‘The Victorian Novelists: Who Were They?’ – a question he answers ...”

“... of Scotland was not always appealing to antiquaries in England. Two of the most important – John Horsley and William Stukeley – paraded, like Camden and Roy, their first-hand knowledge of Roman monuments. Horsley assured readers of Britannia Romana (1733) that in gathering the materials for his chorography ‘several thousand miles were travelled on ...”

“... John Wray’s first book, The Right Hand of Sleep (2001), was a historical novel, narrating the slow collapse of an Austrian hilltown into the embrace of the Nazis. His second, Canaan’s Tongue (2005), was set during the American Civil War, but in place of the wistfulness and nostalgia that pervaded his previous book, this one was reminiscent of William Faulkner in his demonic vein ...”

“... age, yet the taboo often inhibits the old themselves, its horrors caught with ghastly precision by John Betjeman, an author Miller might have made more use of, who regretted too late that he hadn’t had more sex. In ‘Late Flowering Lust’ the self-mockery of the elderly lover, ‘my head is bald my breath is bad,’ going through the motions with ...”

“... Peter Christopherson, whom I knew, though not especially well. When I interviewed Rushton (a.k.a. John Balance) in 2000, one of the things that came up was his deep, abiding love for Kate Bush. Actually, it was more like he saw her as some form of household deity or guardian spirit: ‘She’s so hidden … she’s definitely one of the aspects of the ...”

“... Rudolf Schlichter. Works by Georg Grosz hung on the wall; Kurt Tucholsky, Alfred Döblin and John Heartfield were regulars. Brecht and his crowd were fascinated by America, by its new, brutal version of capitalism which was remaking the world, by its technology and its popular culture. The fascination found its way into his verse and his plays. He went ...”

“... With the queen herself in attendance at the trial, a torpid caution inhibited several counsel. Sir John Hawles seemed to divorce Whiggery from resistance altogether, arguing that there was indeed a supreme power in the state which required absolute obedience: not the monarch, but the Crown-in-Parliament. More conventionally, Sir ...”

“... cards. By the 1980s this was causing difficulties for social scientists and in 1984 the ESRC asked John Bynner to investigate; he recommended that the cohort data be more widely advertised, and transcribed into electronic formats. In the 1990s the data were amalgamated and digitised at the University of Essex. Economists and social researchers from all over ...”

“... scantily clad women and salacious cartoons, he published (or rather, mostly republished) work by John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer, Arthur Conan Doyle, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, P.G. Wodehouse, Anne Sexton and John Updike. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was first serialised in the ...”

“... the iconic and rare-as-hen’s-teeth ‘Multimedia Magazine in a Box’ with work by Andy Warhol, John Cage, John Lennon and Roland Barthes. There’s no shortage of big names mixed in with the obscure stuff – but they’re often not doing what you might expect. As well as Slonimsky’s hymn to Castoria, there are Samuel ...”

“... thousand people. The disaster, all the preachers said, was God’s punishment for sinfulness. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, saw it as divine vengeance for the cruelties of the Portuguese Inquisition. He had identified a minor earthquake near a racecourse in Yorkshire as another such intervention: God ‘purposely chose such a place, where there ...”

“... Life of Huldrych Zwingli with a couplet: ‘Some talk of Martin Luther and some of Calvin (John)/But Zwingli’s hardly mentioned this side of Zollikon.’ Nevertheless, one can’t deny the truth of it. Potter’s admirable book piled up the evidence that would allow English-speakers to reassess Switzerland’s pioneer Reformer, but, nearly half a ...”