“... plots, Lone Ranger clichés and gushing emotions to psychological acuity of the kind you find in John le Carré, whom he’s unlikely to have read. Mai Jia has no interest in the tradition of espionage literature (in a promotional video for Penguin he mentioned only James Bond and Mission Impossible). ‘I read very little,’ he explains, ‘so I have the ...”

“... Napoleonic Wars, a patriotic mythology fixated on the achievements of Nelson, Wellington and Sir John Moore at Corunna tends to filter out fear and uncertainty in favour of a seemingly inevitable procession of victories. As Jenny Uglow stresses in her gripping account of Britain during the Napoleonic era, contemporaries had no such feeling of security. There ...”

“... to make the idea of robbing the rich more palatable: the lion king became the illegitimate Prince John; dumb Bruin became Robin’s pal Little John; put-upon Isengrim became the corrupt sheriff of Nottingham; whiny Chaunticleer became a strutting, singing, country-troubadour cock-of-the-walk; fast-talking Grimbart became ...”

“... piece called Appalachian Spring in collaboration with Aaron Copland and Isamu Noguchi. In 1945, John Cage and Merce Cunningham would marry their exploratory sensibilities. All these artists were struggling, in the words of Lincoln Kirstein, who co-founded the New York City Ballet, ‘to impose a native meaning on a recalcitrant alien dance ...”

“... hope for the two women, whose other male relatives had proven unreliable. Margaret’s brother, John, apprenticed to a Dublin lawyer, had already squandered the family property. Du Preez and Dronfield interpret the motivation behind Bulkley’s decision to take on the persona of James Barry much as Stoker would have. Writing of Hannah Snell and her ...”

“... rate among medical students – who were liable to let the knife slip – was high: the surgeon John Abernethy concluded his lectures with a resigned ‘God help you all.’ When John Phillips Potter nicked his knuckle anatomising – at the dead man’s request – the circus performer the ‘Gnome Fly’, he swiftly ...”

“... example. Its depressed protagonist, the Man in Black, transparently signifies the poet’s patron John of Gaunt, whose obsessive mourning for his wife, Blanche, threatened both his mental health and his public life. At the other end of the spectrum, Pearl at least arguably concludes the Dreamer’s work of mourning when he awakens, consoled yet chastened by ...”

“... as fundamentally collaborative. Chaucer’s work wouldn’t be the same without the patronage of John of Gaunt, or John Donne’s without Robert Drury. Given the sparseness of the documentation, it is particularly instructive to consider aspects of the creation of texts that are not what we would today think of as ...”

“... By June, the hunt for sorcerers had gained force. It was led by two formerly church-avoiding men, John and Marcus. Bratrud was present when some children told the men about their visions: Ralph tapped me on the shoulder and I bent down to hear him say: ‘I see two swords surrounding us in this place. The swords of God’s angels. Nothing can touch ...”

“... from Stockport, Cheshire, who were commissioned to re-create the scenes that the TV man John McCarthy would have missed during his captivity. Employed by the same organisation as McCarthy’s friend Jill Morrell, I was asked by the children to pass on a collection of their work to her. One picture had been painted by a boy called Timothy, who was ...”

“... Irish tradition begins from that point: the language must be worked for all it is worth until, as John Banville’s narrator in his early novel Nightspawn says, ‘we are all up to our balls in paper, and this same testimony would remain: I love words and I hate death. Beyond this, nothing.’ The tradition becomes deeply ironic, loving words for their beauty ...”

“... and had probably already been written about. The material was also going to be sliced wafer thin. John Costello and Oleg Tsarev had already engaged to write about Alexander Orlov and reveal him as the éminence grise behind the Cambridge ring. It was proposed that I should collaborate with former Colonel Yuri Modin and do the Cambridge ring in the post-war ...”

“... chronicles with an uncharacteristic lack of curiosity the hesitancy of the Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson, to strike quickly and hard at the BUF. He records a paper submitted by Anderson to Cabinet a few days before regulation 18B was made, arguing that drastic action was premature, and he quotes the Cabinet minute of the ensuing discussion, which ...”

“... should resist this kind of creeping socialisation. A Belgian musician and designer of automata, John Joseph Merlin, first skated on an early version of roller blades while playing the violin in 1760. But if roller-skating has a long history, it has only a short literature. Unlike cricket, it does not command literary partisans of the calibre of Harold ...”

“... port, Chilean wine and so forth. One of the number could never get enough of the joke. This was John Braine, whose special party-trick was the skipping of ironic bits. When he said that England these days was run by the trade unions and the pansies, he meant it. When he went on about treason and the intellectuals there was grim, literal relish in his ...”