“... Halifax, a parish which from 1593 to 1623 was presided over by a hotly Protestant vicar called John Favour (who figures in the novel, although the historical person was dead by the decade in which it is set). Favour made detailed notes in the parish register about the whoring and adultery of his parishioners, and wrote an anti-Catholic polemic of the most ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... issue to be settled on non-controversial lines. This was a serious phase in his career, as John Grigg’s fine biography makes clear. It is certainly not enough to dismiss the 1910 coalition memorandum, as Mr Sykes does, as the product of ‘an attack of nerves’. From 1910 onwards, L.G. was to some degree an Empire man, if not protectionist. He was a ...”

“... above everything else occasions giving scope to the rapid cut and thrust of spoken controversy. John Lawlor, another pupil, has recorded that argument was the only form of conversation ever employed by Lewis in his presence. It must be a question whether such an eristic temperament made Lewis an ideal tutor, although he was assuredly an outstanding one. He ...”

“... But now we must face the horrors, the other horrors. Early in the 1960s Toomey gives his nephew John Campanati, a young anthropologist interested in language structure, money to go, with his wife, to research in a new African state – money earned from writing ‘sedative fiction’ and film scripts. By now the reader is likely to guess what will ...”

“... M.A.K. Halliday, Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey Leech, Jennifer Coates, F.R. Palmer, R.A. Close, John Sinclair, Jan Firbas, Nils Enkvist, David Crystal, Jan Svartvik, Wolf-Dietrich Bald, Nelson Francis, Morton Bloomfield, E.L. Epstein, John Lyons, Archibald Hill, James Sledd, R.I. McDavid Jr, R.K. O’Cain, Linda ...”

“... and in this he has behind him, not only the authority of Blake’s friends George Cumberland and John Linnell, but more recently that of Sir Geoffrey Keynes. Nevertheless there is still, to my mind, a case to be made for transferral. In the first place, Blake was extremely secretive, and it is clear that no one except his immediate family actually saw him ...”

“... to the important collections of essays edited by J.S. Cockburn (Crime in England, 1550-1750), by John Brewer and John Styles (An Ungovernable People?) and by V.A. Gatrell, B. Lenman and G. Parker (Crime and the Law); to the implications of the work of Peter Laslett; and above all to the burgeoning number of studies of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... seemingly minor events might escalate into large and then cataclysmic ones, as many of us without John Wayne or Rambo’s sense of might-makes-right are now doing. Astrology provided an invaluable tool for periodising history and gauging the relative importance of events. Saturn and Jupiter, the outermost planets known to the 17th century, whose orbits ...”

“... Then there are his relations with the mistress-models (Rose Beuret, Camille Claudel, Gwen John, Claire de Choiseul and others) whose faces and bodies figure as prominently in his sculpture as their feelings for him did in their lives. And there are details of studio practice. The stages whereby a malleable clay face or figure metamorphosed into marble ...”

“... Press. Girodias is one of the major characters in Campbell’s story, and the major character of John de St Jorre’s preposterously indulgent narrative of what he calls ‘the erotic voyage of the Olympia Press’. Girodias was a publisher not only of the forbidden avant garde, but also of pornography. The Merlin boys got into the act, forming a kind of ...”