“... 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 ...”

“... 1960s were a great era of collage in all sorts of media: not just Robert Rauschenberg, but also John Ashbery and Bob Dylan. For Barthelme, it wasn’t simply a matter of playing with found forms or language. That was ‘cheapo surrealism’. Instead his stories explore situations (‘The Party’, ‘Brain Damage’, ‘City Life’) that are experienced as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Miranda Kaufmann’s Black Tudors (2017) tells the stories of free Africans living in England: John Blanke, the royal trumpeter; Edward Swarthye, the trusted upper servant of a leading Gloucestershire landowner; Cattelena, an independent Black ‘singlewoman’ living with her cow in the village of Almondsbury, near Bristol; Reasonable Blackman (or ...”

“... a great personage, there is a need to look elsewhere for a more discriminating view. Inevitably, John Grigg’s biography of Lloyd George invites such comparisons and they redound almost wholly to Grigg’s credit, except in one obvious respect: beginning at much the same time, Gilbert actually finished the job, albeit reinforced in his labours by a research ...”

“... awareness there was of this development is clear from the fascinating pamphlets published by John Snare, an antiquarian bookseller who was convinced that he had found Velázquez’s portrait of the future King Charles I of England, made in Madrid in 1623. In the course of legal action in 1851 concerning the ownership of the picture, London picture ...”

“... At the Montgomery bus terminal, white vigilantes pummelled them, beat several reporters, and left John Seigenthaler, a high-ranking Kennedy administration official sent to monitor the protests, unconscious. The Alabama State Police stood inert just blocks from the depot while the mob rampaged. The whites who defended Jim Crow in Alabama were not social ...”

“... the page. Boswell, a slovenly, scribbling, lovable Scot, and Johnson, a cantankerous old genius, a John Bull himself, now appear to us as creatures of one another’s making. Together they constitute a minor archipelago of literary selves.In the past it seemed natural to admire one at the expense of the other, and most natural of all, to see Boswell as the ...”

“... hitherto regarded as talentless, overrated, or simply wankers: Oasis, the Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, William Shakespeare (although to be fair they despise the comedies and some of the history plays only). ‘It is ...”

“... separable. Writers – Sir Thomas More, Sir Walter Ralegh, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, Thomas May, John Milton, Andrew Marvell and many more – moved between history and poetry or drama, finding in them complementary means of instilling virtue and wisdom and influencing events. History, which was seen as a branch not only of scholarship but of rhetoric and of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... While John Kasarda shares the title page of this scientific romance masquerading as a work of urban theory, Aerotropolis was written by Greg Lindsay alone. Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s business school, may be a peculiar sort of Johnson, but Lindsay, a business journalist, is nonetheless his committed Boswell ...”

“... and the false. But he died, at just 48, in 1960, and did not himself get to such a philosophy. John Searle studied under Austin in Oxford in the 1950s, then went to Berkeley, where he has remained. He published his first book, Speech Acts, in 1969 and is Austin’s pre-eminent heir. He’s certainly not fussed about the distinction between statements of ...”