“... the 1780s, when the evangelical revival stirred the Baptists back into action, Shrewton’s vicar, John Skinner, lived in Salisbury, where he was master of the cathedral choristers; he left the parish to an underling who served three livings on low pay and celebrated communion three times a year. Most of the labouring poor avoided church and resented church ...”

“... so sparingly, cherry-picking from already known and accessible texts. But this soon changed. John Burnett used annotated extracts to illustrate various aspects of working-class life in Useful Toil and Destiny Obscure. By 1981, David Vincent had found 142 memoirs spanning the years from 1790 to 1850, and in Bread, Knowledge and Freedom used them to ...”

“... being negotiated with France, reignited the wrath of the North Briton’s flamboyant co-editor John Wilkes and his backers in the City, prompting the publication of another withering issue, number 45. The new prime minister, George Grenville, and his secretary of state, Lord Halifax, decided it was time to put a stop to this constant assault on government ...”

“... This effect presages the ‘dark style’ met later in the exhibition in Caravaggio’s St John the Baptist in the Wilderness (1603) and his Salome of c.1609, a forsaking of fine description for brute urgency that met with Bellori’s censure. For a follower, like Bellori, of the Italian tradition based on figure drawing and epitomised by Raphael, the ...”

“... extraordinary Chinese dairy at Woburn, approached through massed azaleas and rhododendrons, and of John Nash’s elegant gallery in Regent Street with its models and plaster casts – two other buildings that no longer survive. When Pückler retells stories told him by others we begin to suspect that some scepticism might have been appropriate. At ...”

“... a ship called the Zembla). McGuire’s opening sentence is an ironic allusion to John’s gospel – ‘Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe. And Pilate saith unto them, Behold the man’ – but it also recalls the beginning of the novel that The North Water most resembles, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood ...”

“... Greene. The idea of a man whose life is changed by an operation on his face was inspired by the John Frankenheimer thriller Seconds, in which John Randolph is given a new identity – turned into Rock Hudson – by a shadowy organisation. The gory detail of the procedure was influenced by the body disposal scene in Ian ...”

“... gnomically (but it’s the truth), ‘Beckmann was time.’ He was successful early, painting John Martin-like catastrophes on a huge scale: visionary, awful, sandy things. The first monograph on him appeared before the First World War, when he was still in his twenties. In the war, he was an ambulance man on the Western Front, before suffering a complete ...”

“... sexual assault. The political centre of the court now shifted from Kennedy to the chief justice, John Roberts. Appointed by George W. Bush in 2005, Roberts was at one time a reliable Republican. He has been a bit less predictable of late, principally because, as chief justice, he is trying to ensure that the court retains a veneer of respectability. Roberts ...”

“... and Hawksmoor’. Invoking those artists rather flatters whoever designed it (Orbach proposes John James). The third prodigy of the English baroque, Thomas Archer, like Vanbrugh worked nearby in Dorset and Hampshire (both of which south Wiltshire might comfortably be part of). Vanbrugh is the possible author of Netherhampton House, between Salisbury and ...”

“... An older, less glamorous friend of the Krays, ‘a regular visitor to Ron in Broadmoor’, is John Masterson, a Scot living in Peckham: ‘the longest period he has spent outside prison since his teens – he is now in his mid-forties – has been five years’. He says he has always been treated with ‘respect’ by fellow prisoners: ‘I certainly felt ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... flux. They are no longer able to sink their internal differences in a broad attachment to what Sir John Seeley called ‘Greater Britain’. They are not yet sure, most of them, that they want to be Europeans. Yet many do not see themselves, or desire to see themselves, as British. Is the answer, then, for the monarchy to revive one of its most traditional ...”

“... lover Gaston Palewski (‘Colonel’), she reports that Odette Massigli is having an affair with John Lehmann, who had never liked women before’. ‘Are you shrieking, Colonel?’ One hopes that he was. ‘I have been screaming with laughter for several days on end,’ Nancy reports, after reading a life of Queen Victoria. The French General Election of ...”