“... David Bindman does not think that Hogarth was joking when he gave one of his contemporaries, John Nichols, a comic demonstration of minimalism: it took the form of a diagram composed of three lines and he claimed that it contained his memory of ‘a Sergeant with his pike going into an Ale House, and his Dog following ...”

“... linked constitutional crisis, which forced the monarchy to call the Estates General. The first, John Bosher has told us, was the result not only of defaultings in tax payments after bad harvests but of the system itself, which was dependent upon the personal credit of innumerable local tax officials and provincial trésoriers who anticipated revenues by ...”

“... By the time you read me, anything might be happening. Brian Clough or Bob Stokoe or Elton John could be the new England manager, nursing bruised dreams for the World Cup in 1986. On the other hand, Sir Ron Greenwood might even now be contentedly inspecting the hotels in Bilbao, hoping to find a likely venue for the lads next summer. Thanks to a series ...”

“... their own performances, behind footlights or from Java; hence the cult of Eleanora Duse, on which John Stokes here contributes a very good paper. Shaw admired her extraordinary professional skills, but others saw her as a Prazian Fatal Woman, wishing to be scared or exalted out of their wits by her. ‘Her great discovery was probably to have found that ...”

“... of the maimed Victorian sexual life – the disclosed private writings of Munby, Housman, John Addington Symonds and others – but we are strangely put off by the unseemly nakedness of their personal outpourings. The imagery they chose – their two ladybirds, each on the other side of the window, close, but unable to touch, the spectator consigned ...”

“... illumination, of the kind Visser’s book is full of. At the Last Supper, as we know, the apostle John lies ‘on Jesus’s breast’, but it seems we need not take this as any sign of special affection. Diners at a Jewish banquet would recline close together on a couch for two, each of them raised on his left elbow; and accordingly, to address one’s ...”

“... prosecution case against Edgar A. Poe looks a strong one. Taken in by the Richmond tobacco broker John Allan when left orphaned at the age of two by the death of his actress mother Eliza, brought up as a member of the family and sent to the University of Virginia, he responded by running up gambling debts and drinking, so that he left after a ...”

“... the overseas intelligence service, also ensures them a significant place in government. In 1995, John Major estimated that the Foreign Office received 40,000 pieces of secret intelligence a year, around 25,000 of them from GCHQ and 15,000 from the SIS. The volume of material is so great that it requires a separate secretariat and committee, the Joint ...”

“... original almanac, is a nicely calculated piece of book production, evocative without quaint-ness. John Hibberd’s Introduction is sympathetic and informative; and his translation – to a reader with very feeble German – seems extraordinarily appealing. He only offers a selection, though a substantial one, from the Schatzkästlein, together with a few ...”

“... its lack of actual independence tolerable. There was only one problem: if Augustus wasn’t king (John Drinkwater translates princeps, the evasive, multivalent honorific used by and of Augustus, as ‘boss’), how was power to be transferred when he died? Much care was taken to fudge the answer. With a suitable show of reluctance, Tiberius allowed the senate ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... no prerogative but what the law of the land allows him,’ he was echoing what his predecessor Sir John Fortescue had written in the 15th century: the king had no power to alter the law (that was for Parliament) or to administer it (that was for the judges). He was also reacting to what the law reporter John Hawarde had ...”

“... and finally by a number of clerics. For many historians, this detail, recorded by the chronicler John of Worcester, would be no more than a fascinating piece of useless information. For Professor Jacques Le Goff, it is a clue which helps us to understand the 12th century a little better. Le Goff, whose collected essays, written between 1956 and 1976, and ...”

“... an English (or even a British) one, and it has become less so with every generation. The essays by John MacKenzie and John Hattendorf in Cannadine’s collection address this subject, although clearly the ‘global’ Nelson could have filled a volume by himself. A substantial percentage of his crews were not from the ...”

“... diminished. In Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), a pivotal Supreme Court decision, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that Indians had a ‘right of occupancy’, but were not full owners of their land as whites understood it. Nonetheless, to the end of the 19th century, even as the federal government forcibly expelled Indians from the eastern half of the ...”