“... 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 ...”

“... indeed I have just heard from the clarinettist’s owner, the Los Angeles collector and inventor John Gaughan, that the android’s performance was not quite what it seemed, though it was nonetheless impressive. His instrument was sealed at both ends and air was blown into it not through his mouth but through his thumb. Each of the 32 keys controlled a brass ...”

“... are the constant companions of the earnest seeker after light), and the great unclassifiable, John Bunyan. The composition of this canon changed somewhat as new names established themselves, though working-class reading always lagged a literary generation or two behind. (Penurious readers, picking up their books from second-hand stalls, could rarely ...”

“... and which prefigures the cross, the Last Supper, the lamb of God, the pointing finger of John the Baptist, the resurrected Christ trampling the dragon or skeleton of sin and death. Many of them also depict the new church, in representations of Protestant celebration of the gospel sacraments of baptism and communion, and in portraits of its leaders or ...”

“... professional. In the mid-17th century, the Royal Society established a committee including Dryden, John Evelyn and Edmund Waller, ‘to improve the English tongue’. Nothing much came of this. In 1658, Milton’s nephew Edward Philips had published a New World of English Words which reached its seventh edition by 1720. Swift busied himself with the state of ...”

“... Britain without reference to the superb and painful full-length history of it that the late John Vyvyan published in 1969, In Pity and in Anger. (His notes refer, however, to the sequel, though that carries him beyond his chosen period.) It is flabbergasting that he should do so without mentioning that, when the University of Oxford built a vivisection ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... we need to know about Julia’s social position. Unobtrusive effects like this help to explain John Braine’s statement, reproduced on the dust-jacket of this new recruit to the trilogy, that a ‘whole generation of writers is in William Cooper’s debt, just as the previous generation was in James Joyce’s debt’. But this comparison, justified though ...”

“... staffer of the Eye and co-published by the Eye. Reviewers? Auberon Waugh in the Daily Mail; John Wells twice, once in Harper’s and once in the Times; Christopher Booker in the Spectator; Malcolm Muggeridge in the Daily Telegraph; Candida Lycett-Green (who was in love with Ingrams at Oxford, speaks adoringly of him in this book, and once worked for the ...”

“... better things, and for some reason not quite bringing it off in this fine but flawed collection. John Harrison keeps well within his limits in The Ice Monkey, and Other Stories. Written over the period from 1975 to 1982, these seven stories have a sharpness of detail and a sureness of overall control that is wholly admirable. At the same time, Harrison does ...”

“... Whitehall Place for Charles I (a combination of the Escorial and the Baths of Caracalla); John Martin’s three-storey Thames-side quay (which looks like something out of Cleopatra); and a scheme for standing the Crystal Palace on its end as a 1,000-foot-high memorial to Albert (the ‘Towering Inferno’ before its time). For foolishness, there is a ...”

“... Donald Winch has long been known for path-breaking studies of the Smithian and Keynesian epochs. John Burrow’s elegant anatomy of the evolutionary paradigm in Victorian Britain has recently been succeeded by a rightfully acclaimed historiographical work. Though three names appear upon the title page, they have pooled their intellectual capital to a ...”

“... meanwhile has had to come to terms with its historical shame, even though the Prime Minister, John Howard, derides this as ‘black armband’ history and wishes it away. How racism reproduces itself in contemporary Australia is the subject of Race Matters. The contributors give sardonic accounts of such topics as the attempt to re-assign Aboriginal names ...”

“... and always, a writer, flush with rage. He was an elective invisible. The artisan, the artificer. John Bayley, describing James Joyce in a review in this journal, called him ‘the penman of the family’. Praise indeed. A curse from which there is no possible abdication, a lifelong task, and one which Ian Penman has accepted with quixotic and sharp-witted ...”