“... an argument with the trainer, who told him that with his attitude ‘the founder of the police, John Peel, would have been ashamed of me.’ Everyone laughs and Jim continues: ‘So I said to her: “John Peel – what? You mean the dead disc jockey?” And then I said: “Don’t you mean Robert Peel? Cos if it was ...”

“... The iterative wit of the phantom bibliography is at work in the best-known early English example: John Donne’s Catalogus librorum aulicorum incomparabilium et non vendibilium, or The Courtier’s Library of Rare Books Not for Sale. Unpublished until 1650, Donne wrote the text between about 1603 and 1611, and it proved popular in manuscript with his coterie ...”

“... that the wonderful vision contained in the Book of Revelation was not written by a man named John (even if he was a different John from the Gospel-writer or the author of three Epistles). The book known as Acts of the Apostles claims to be by the same author as Luke’s Gospel, but this is a vexed issue Ehrman chooses ...”

“... even though he was already engaged to the beautiful 18-year-old Elaine Orr, whom John Dos Passos described as a ‘poet’s dream’ and about whom Cummings would write hundreds of poems. Thayer was less annoyed, it seems, at losing Vivien than at Eliot’s sense of superiority. He compared Eliot the critic to a father punishing a naughty ...”

“... saint before his flesh had cooled. Churches could compete over relics: several claimed the head of John the Baptist, giving rise to more than one apocryphal tale. St Benedict, author of the Benedictine Rule, was said to lie at Fleury in France and in his own monastery of Monte Cassino outside Rome; both places built up a catalogue of miracles to vindicate ...”

“... municipal gardens, bent over their spades and forks in regulation red hats and green waistcoats (John Major’s father was a gnome-fancier, founding Major’s Garden Ornaments in 1930). The arrival of concrete and then plastic saw their once fine features blunted for the mass market and today’s gnome population, Twigs Way tells us in Garden Gnomes: A ...”

“... He doesn’t take his own advice, and he clearly suggests that some of his colleagues, such as John Darwin, have already imbibed the message of complexity, though the popular debate remains stuck in the crude old ruts. Even John Seeley’s notorious claim, borrowed by Porter for the title of his earlier book, that ‘we ...”

“... lay behind his homespun appeal (he ended his career as the prosecuting attorney at the trial of John Scopes, the Tennessee teacher charged with teaching evolution in 1925). France, meanwhile, was torn apart by the Dreyfus Affair. Division on this scale is potentially fatal to democracy; trust, as Runciman reminds us, is its lifeblood. However, both ...”

“... overshadowed by a sale of Impressionist art at Christie’s, and almost escaped the attention of John Maynard Keynes, a Newton enthusiast. As it was, Keynes missed most of the lots, and shortly after the auction set about clawing back papers from successful bidders. Most of what he recovered concerned alchemy. On his death in 1946, Keynes bequeathed what is ...”

“... My story​ will be that John Harvard gave it to me. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked, pointing at a bronze bust in the reading room where I had arrived to give my lecture, and was told that it was the university’s founder, John Harvard. ‘Damn,’ I said. ‘It never even occurred to me that Harvard was a guy ...”

“... he moved to France with his wife and their infant daughter, Laura.Paris was where Mathews met John Ashbery, then a Fulbright Scholar. It was 1956. Ashbery introduced him to the work of the eccentric procedural writer Raymond Roussel, which reignited Mathews’s literary imagination. In 1959 he came into some money and used it to found a little magazine ...”

“... and institutions, all run by and serving African Americans. To be sure, as the Black historian John Hope Franklin, who spent his early years in Tulsa, pointed out in his memoirs, the label ‘Black Wall Street’ was a bit of a misnomer. Most of the residents worked as cooks and maids in the homes of white Tulsans and many lived in rented rooms or shacks ...”

“... a Neoplatonist meditation, and The Ladder of Divine Ascent, compiled by the Byzantine monk John Climacus, who lived on Mount Sinai in the seventh century. From the latter Weinberger offers one-liners of absurdist wisdom, echoing Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell but nothing like as sublime: ‘Snow cannot burst into flames’; ‘Waves never leave ...”

“... floating in the water. Dragging the corpse to land, he discovered it was Harry Gouge, a servant of John Dandy’s, whose watermill Wood had just left. He fetched Dandy, who came with two other men. Witnesses at the inquest testified that Dandy had often beaten Gouge, who had no water in his lungs, meaning that he hadn’t drowned. Other evidence came from the ...”

“... in San Francisco published a pamphlet taking issue with claims made by California’s governor, John Bigler, who had characterised the state’s 7520 Chinese migrants as servile ‘coolies’ undercutting white workers. ‘The poor Chinaman does not come here as a slave,’ Tong Achick and Chun Aching wrote in An Analysis of the Chinese Question. ‘He ...”