“... The Iraq Inquiry​ , chaired by Sir John Chilcot and composed of five privy councillors, finally published its report on the morning of 6 July, seven years and 21 days after it was established by Gordon Brown with a remit to ‘look at the run-up to the conflict, the conflict itself and the reconstruction, so that we can learn lessons ...”

“... Named Desire. Brando wasn’t an easy sell: the producer, Irene Selznick, favoured the movie star John Garfield. Marlon was a shade too young for Stanley, who is a war veteran. He was clearly hard to manage. But he had a mixture of brute and poet that Kazan urged on Selznick and Tennessee Williams.That was just the start, for in rehearsal Kazan built up ...”

“... were filled in America. The largest psychiatric institutions downsized or were shuttered. John F. Kennedy announced that the ‘reliance on the cold mercy of custodial isolation’ could now be ‘supplanted by the open warmth of community concern and capability’. It didn’t work out like that.Mimi thought that as long as her boys took their ...”

“... down in a stream with her legs in the air. Footprints incriminate Edith’s estranged husband, John, who had left her for a barmaid nine years previously. Shardlake suspects John Boleyn has been framed. If he hangs, which seems likely, it would scandalise Elizabeth, who orders an investigation and wants him pardoned if ...”

“... commission’s few remaining members resigned en masse, citing lack of progress.The​ sociologist John Goldthorpe has spent almost fifty years developing and championing his version of the class analysis approach. It has become the international norm in sociological research and is the basis of the categorisation used by the UK’s Office for National ...”

“... disloyalty, ambition, greed, insecurity and all the British hypocrisies that he crashed into. John Preston has made the most of it, providing not only a very readable and amusing book but also the fullest account yet of what actually happened. Some of his sourcing could be clearer – there are rather vague appendices and no footnotes – but he is ...”

“... true church’, but not ‘the unspotted lambs of the Lord’ as the Elizabethan chronicler John Stow claimed (this was another slur: Stow had Catholic sympathies).Puritanism has long commanded historical attention. Collinson helped put the politics back in, working with the grain of the ‘new’ social and cultural histories of the 1980s. What emerged ...”

“... neatly divided by four traditional ‘quarter days’ – Annunciation (25 March), the Nativity of John the Baptist (24 June), Michaelmas (29 September) and Christmas – that were used as deadlines for instalments of rent and debt.The annual religious cycle melded with older traditions of seasonal celebration, and spurred new ones too. In England the calendar ...”

“... of grandmothers’.Psychological Care for Infant and Child (1928) by the American behaviourist John Watson (a follower of Truby King) found enthusiastic readers in interwar Britain. Behaviourist thinking separated the adult and the child into discrete categories. The child is the ‘shadow’ cast by the adult citizen, more animal than human: ‘If you ...”

“... field for a woman. Its policy on female employees was unusually egalitarian. When Matheson met John Reith, the first director-general, through her work for Astor, he recruited her to be director of talks on the phenomenal salary of £900 a year. She was 38 and unmarried, fully formed as a character. Yet the Matheson of this period remains, despite her ...”

“... the party’s co-operation agreement with the Scottish Greens. Yousaf and his replacement, John Swinney, sullied their reputations by defending the former health secretary Michael Matheson, who misled Holyrood’s presiding officer over £11,000 of roaming charges racked up on his iPad. The SNP’s centralising tendencies, lack of transparency and ...”

“... Only A Vindication of the Rights of Woman could be readily bought, in an Everyman, bound up with John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of Women. In a second-hand shop I found a 1906 edition of her Original Stories (for children), with an introduction by E.V. Lucas and five of the Blake plates reproduced. The other modern edition I acquired was called The ...”

“... that Picasso, towards the end of his life, became addicted to all-in wrestling on the telly – as John Richardson informs us in the sympathetic account of those years (and brave attempt to defend Picasso’s late work) which appeared in the New York Review of Books on 19 July 1984. However private these sketchbooks were, they reveal, more and more as we ...”

“... sent to Lewes by his literary friends on receiving copies of his clearly lamentable novels. John Stuart Mill wrote explaining that he needed to read the book through a second time before making his comments, though meanwhile he liked it ‘on the whole decidedly better than I expected from your own account of it’, Bulwer Lytton pronounced: ‘You have ...”

“... are quite explicit about sex. There is a good deal of masturbation, a dress stained with semen (John Gilbert’s), lesbian couplings, Stokowski failing to make it, Churchill groping and salivating on the Onassis yacht, and a total disavowal of the famous interlude with Cecil Beaton. If Gronowicz’s transcriptions are to be believed, Greta Garbo kept no ...”