“... A mong​ John Clare’s drawings of ‘pootys’ (snail shells) and birds is a doodle of his imagined tombstone. It bears the inscription: ‘HERE Rest the HOPES and Ashes of JOHN CLARE.’ The masons missed the memo. Clare’s actual memorial, erected after his death in 1864, reads ‘Northamptonshire Peasant Poet’, borrowing the epithet from the title page of his first collection, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820 ...”

“... papers’ at his neighbour’s house and ordered the same pattern himself, writing to Joseph Trollope & Sons, wallpaper suppliers: ‘I care nothing about fashion if they are neat & clean.’ If a man was facing marriage he was likely to find his purse under pressure; the strings could be tightened later on but at this stage it was politic to err ...”

“... a pair of divine twins in the form of horses. This myth has survived in some unlikely places. John Aubrey ascribed the Uffington White Horse to the brothers, though more recent archaeologists have dated it even earlier, to the Bronze Age. In Lower Saxony, the horse-head gables featured on many farmhouses were still referred to as ‘Hengst und Hors’ as ...”

“... it had been in the days when O’Hara and the gang could go downtown to the Blue Note and hear John Coltrane or uptown to hear Billie Holiday. This kind of nostalgia can be tiresome: better for each generation to invent a new idea of the new – to enlarge the temple. In his poems, Hofmann has found a way to do this. In each, no matter how short, one feels ...”

“... crowded room, Clark suggests at first; towards the rite of betrothal binding the Virgin Mary to Joseph, an act that causes the branch that Joseph holds to burst into flower. The woman behind the column ‘is the very figure of attention’, Clark writes. ‘She is the one of all the spectators, we are convinced, who looks ...”

“... Galerie 22 in Düsseldorf in November 1959. In a letter that year, he explained that Hommage à John Cage: Music for Audiotapes and Piano was composed around three ten-minute movements, each containing a number of cultural references. The first combined Duchamp, Dostoevsky and Kurt Schwitters. ‘It proves,’ he wrote, ‘that the sublime is essentially ...”

“... of immortality which leaves a man with someone else’s name in the title of his biography. It was Joseph Severn, the amiable artist whose kindness sweetened Keats’s last months, who referred to Trelawny as ‘Lord Byron’s jackal’. The phrase was less harsh than it may seem to a modern ear, since a jackal, in the parlance of the time, was someone who ...”

“... of Russian Jewry seems to have spread to the continent as a whole. In the Habsburg Empire, Joseph II’s Toleranzpatent (1782) was based on ‘the patronising idea of improvement ... an effort to bring the Jews up to scratch’. The emancipation of the Jews in France (1791) was an attempt not to accommodate but to eliminate their ...”

“... pattern with Johns. About one fifth of all males in the UK between 1800 and 1850 were christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples ...”

“... will take its place alongside Gladstone’s diaries, the letters of Carlyle and Disraeli, and John Stuart Mill’s collected works as an indispensable resource for understanding the Victorians. With the possible exception of Adam Smith, there can be few economic gurus who have been so vulnerable to sustained political hijacking by left and right. From the ...”

“... refuges for repentant prostitutes or bankrupted merchants. Shortly before his death in 1791, John Wesley looked back on the century as one in which ‘benevolence and compassion toward all the forms of human woe have increased in a manner not known before, from the earliest ages of the world.’ Not everyone was sympathetic to forms of woe – especially ...”

“... their families to the coast. The inspiration behind the scheme was George Lansbury, the subject of John Shepherd’s biography, a book as meticulous as it is generous. It is nonetheless timely: just as the prison service has brown-filled this pleasant site, so, too, New Labour has trampled on the radical socialism of which Lansbury was one of the finest ...”

“... behind the screen in The School for Scandal while two elderly knights as Sir Peter Teazle and Joseph Surface crawled with maddening deliberation and pointless pauses through their scene. Suddenly losing patience, she boomed aloud for all to hear: ‘Oh, do get a move on, you silly old pongers!’ Or the one about ...”

“... counter to the slow march of figures, taking the form of silent communication between Christ and John, their contact barred by a stern Roman officer, as the Virgin Mary faints. Some of the later narratives in the nave (scenes from the New Testament twinned with the Old) achieve a similar intensity, reducing the action to minimal but memorable formulae, often ...”

“... it from the spiritual. The greatest of Irish medieval thinkers, the ninth-century philosopher John Scottus Eriugena, saw the cosmos as a self-delighting play of pure difference, in which subject and object, perceiver and perceived, were intimately allied. In some ways, his thought is a lot closer to Nietzsche and poststructuralism than it is to Leibniz or ...”