“... the head inspires discussions of mental illness, hairstyles, beheading, and the rival relics of John the Baptist’s head. Under the rubric of skin, Hartnell ad-dresses flaying, leprosy, plastic surgery, racial difference and manuscripts – for, as others have pointed out, most of what we know about the premodern past is written on the skins of dead ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... career of a competent civil servant. A member of the king’s household and lifelong retainer of John of Gaunt, Chaucer served as a diplomat, controller of the wool custom, clerk of the king’s works, deputy forester, justice of the peace for Kent and Member of Parliament. In addition to his large poetic corpus, we have several prose works and a few ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... what the devil to make of this music, and most of us were frank enough to say so’, as the critic John Runciman put it – an attitude that no doubt contributed to the perception that Delius’s music was formless.Delius spent so much of his life abroad that the British context offers only a partial perspective. As a child he taught himself piano, having had ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he’d done more than anyone to establish was headquartered on the other side of the Atlantic. John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke, the most important British science fiction writers to emerge after the war, published in the pages of American magazines. Attempts to revive the domestic scene failed to gather momentum until 1954, when New Worlds – a former ...”

“... United Mine Workers of America. He joined the union and his wife hung a portrait of its president, John L. Lewis, above her piano. But the Turners, like other Black families in town, were used by mine supervisors to destroy the solidarity between miners, in an attempt to break the union. The UMWA had been integrated since its founding in 1890 and in parts of ...”

“... people think I’m a monster.’ The biography he authorised and checked – Hitch by his friend John Russell Taylor – appeared two years before his death on 29 April 1980 to contradict this idea, and, for all its blandness and sparseness of reference, brought much information to light. Its blurb called it ‘the only serious biography of the man ...”

“... registers: ‘Successful shade, accept my hand in fraternal contrition! We are druv’ to it. John Bull will have it so. Tu l’as voulu John Dandin! And his lady still more! Let us toe the line, my brothers, and invest with care. Londres vaut bien une messe.’ Then catch at your own coat-tails. ‘An unpardonable ...”

“... and redemption, of long-awaited messiahs and of betrayals with a Judas kiss. The challenge John Campbell has set himself is to write an authoritative though not authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher that acknowledges its subject’s calibre while sorting through and sifting the legends that have grown up around her. In this, the first of two ...”

“... was uneventful, ‘at least until it started to go wrong’. From articled pupil in the office of John Hutchison, a local architect, he went to the more eminent firm of Honeyman and Keppie as a draughtsman while studying part-time at the GSA, then housed in rooms above the McLellan Galleries in Sauchiehall Street, just round the corner from the current ...”

“... predictable, the first is not. Tradition has it that it was in or on Patmo or Patmos that St John the Divine saw the Apocalypse – a Greek word meaning the disclosure of long-term planning or the shape of things to come. Now there is much in St John’s Revelation that I would like to talk about, but I will confine ...”