“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... feral figures became our familiar louche aristocrats and sapphic seductresses, most notably in John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (the other story written during that famous summer on Lake Geneva in 1816), Keats’s ‘Lamia’, Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Groom calls Dracula a ‘brilliant culmination’ and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for his next venture, in Ireland. Despite his background, his move there in 1896 was coincidental. John Leslie appealed in the SDF’s paper, Justice, for a socialist organisation to hire Connolly, who was facing destitution, and a job offer came from the Dublin Socialist Club at the modest salary of £1 per week. His time in Ireland would help shape his ...”

“... spearmen, total victory, the Black Prince winning his spurs and, by the end of the year, both John II of France and David II of Scotland safely locked up in the Tower of London awaiting ransom. Mission accomplished. Except it wasn’t. Sumption takes us on through the chevauchées – the large-scale mounted raids that the English used to weaken and ...”

“... that philosophy always answer to practical needs. Kitcher is inspired here by the pragmatist John Dewey, whom he calls ‘the most important philosopher of the 20th century’. (I suspect that Kitcher’s nostalgia for philosophers as public intellectuals is largely for Dewey himself, a singular figure in the history of American philosophy.) Dewey ...”

“... on any film and store it. Storing would then become the main endeavour of a filmmaker.’When John Lennon was killed in 1980, Ono became the guardian of his work and set about retrieving items that had belonged to him. (Gillon Aitken wrote about bidding on behalf of Ono for Lennon’s tie in the LRB of 25 July 1991.) She saw at first-hand the growth of ...”

“... 1950s,’ he once remarked, ‘I was awakened by the photographs of Walker Evans and the movies of John Ford, especially Grapes of Wrath, where the poor “Okies” (mostly farmers whose land dried up) go to California with mattresses on their cars rather than stay in Oklahoma and starve.’ Even as Ruscha presents this folk experience as already mediated, he ...”

“... when they developed and patented steam looms for carpet-weaving: ‘Let each carpet produced by John Crossley be its own traveller,’ the slogan went. The Crossley family bought the house from Samuel Morton Peto, who built the Houses of Parliament and Nelson’s Column before going bankrupt from his investments in the railways: he had to give up the house ...”

“... though I’d have thought the chances of him persuading his mamma to come are pretty slim. John Gielgud was once telling me about Mrs Simpson and how smart she was. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘she’d have made a disastrous queen. Didn’t go to the theatre at all.’ 19 January. Alan Bates opens tonight at the Barbican in the RSC production of Antony ...”

“... appreciated.He did not think much of the Irish. ‘Apart from the fact,’ he wrote to his friend John Hayward, ‘that the Irish have a certain respect for poetry and religion, theirs is a tiring society; and the kind of war nerves they are suffering from – not really daring to make up their minds what they think, and not being really prepared for anything ...”

“... Despite a new paralysis – my back –Am stirred, perhaps, to mine the new resource,Put down my worn suitcases and unpack.[Publications]Reader, should I turn another page?Fly off to somewhere, maybe even worse?Or limp serenely into middle ageAnd try to flog this flimsy book of verse? [c/o Fig Tree PocketQldAustraliaphotopies ofrelevantdocumentati ...”

“... correctness gone mad’. (Criticism didn’t come only from the Right: see, for example, John Upton’s piece in the LRB, 1 July 1999.) The accusations Johnson had in mind might include an article about Macpherson by a certain Boris Johnson that appeared in the Guardian last February – in which the author wondered how ‘this sober old ...”

“... digitally rejigged versions were released in the late 1990s: in the merchandising of Star Wars, John Seabrook writes in NoBrow (2000), ‘dreams were being spun into desire, and desire into product.’ And then one day I got tired of it all and gave my toys away to a younger boy who lived down the road. A Galaxy Not So Far Away opens with a brilliant and ...”