“... There would be one more escape, in 1960. Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers, Clarence and John, got away – and not one body washed up anywhere. That’s the basis for the Don Siegel film, Escape from Alcatraz (1979), in which Clint Eastwood played Morris and the warden was the late Patrick McGoohan, so famous himself as ‘The Prisoner’. There was ...”

“... often waned as Comte’s doctrines were more fully understood (most famously in the case of John Stuart Mill, whose early admiration for Comte’s phenomenalism and rationality gradually gave way to revulsion at his dogmatism, religiosity, ‘moralism’ and hostility to personal liberty). Nevertheless, prominent 19th-century figures who acknowledged a ...”

“... with the feminist Christabel Marshall – who wrote under the name Christopher Marie St John – Edy designed and produced a huge number of suffragist and antiwar plays. Holroyd lists these achievements, but fails to suppress a light if persistent drumbeat of condescension. Edy was ‘a natural suffragist’ in that ‘she did not have to think very ...”

“... still policed its own members and more than a few were called to the bar for going too far. Sir John Coventry, whose story is told in Patterson’s dazzling prelude, might not have had his nose slit open, supposedly with the king’s approval, if he had been disciplined by his peers for casting aspersions on the king’s morals. The privacy of debate was ...”

“... Obama’s promise to withdraw ‘one to two’ combat brigades a month for 16 months. Suddenly, John McCain’s belief that US troops should stay until some undefined victory looked impractical and out of date. The Iraqi government seemed almost surprised by its own decisiveness. It is by no means as confident as it pretends to be that it can survive ...”

“... give content to his rhetoric and rescue him from himself – as well as from his mother. The good John Shorne, we are told, ‘was his father’s son; the bad John was the son of his mother.’ And so we come again to Lady Sackville. The description of her in Broderie anglaise is very close, in places identical, to ...”

“... about birds and had much to tell us on subjects ranging from the fossil avifauna of Britain to John Clare’s poetic bird tally. A naturalist and conservationist, he had previously written the most detailed biography imaginable of the fulmar; was one of the editors of the New Naturalist Library; and regularly appeared on the BBC. The Shell book covers ...”

“... 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 ...”