“... we read it as a version of what happened. The value of Congo was at first its ivory. But in 1888, John Boyd Dunlop, an Ulster Scot living in Belfast, made a discovery which would make the Congo Basin one of the most lucrative places on earth. In The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber, John Tully describes the moment ...”

“... scientists of the 16th and 17th centuries – prominent among them Queen Elizabeth’s surgeon, John Banister, as well as Francis Bacon, Sir Kenelm Digby and Robert Boyle. Mummy continued to be dispensed well into the 18th century, when Robert James’s Pharmacopeia Universalis (1747) advised: Mummy resolves coagulated Blood, and is said to be effectual in ...”

“... like it, and it’s all completely secret.’ We were joined by a man in his late twenties called John, with long curly hair and very blue eyes. He said: ‘Bush looked good today. He just talked to reporters at the White House and he was really on a roll. Speaking extemporaneously for a few minutes at a time. He’s good at that kind of back and forth. It ...”

“... face lifted for the fourth time – the Doctors say no more), then Cecil [Beaton] and John Gielgud came to stay with us, and we went to Venice on Arturo Lopez’s yacht … Oh yes, I forgot Noel Coward – he fell in love with Jack. Jack hated it All. Later, in his thirties, he would tire also of the Greeks: ‘The children are so horrid: have ...”

“... of how a degree-less provincial could match university-educated courtly playwrights such as John Lyly at their own game. The other writer, however, dealt with French current affairs and the social position of education in a different manner: GUISE: My Lord of Anjou, there are a hundred Protestants Which we have chased into the river Seine That swim ...”

“... for them. As lovers they are inept, incapable of communicating human warmth. Their prototype is John Coetzee, the subject of Summertime (2009), the third in Coetzee’s triptych of ‘autobiographical’ novels. Its metafictional conceit is that Coetzee has died and a biographer, writing about him in the 1970s when he was still making his way as a ...”

“... Schuyler had an inkling. Having been introduced to the audience at the Dia Art Foundation by John Ashbery, he read from his newly published Selected Poems, on the back cover of which Ashbery’s blurb declared: ‘Schuyler is simply the best we have.’He began the reading that night with the first poem he ever published, ‘Salute’, written in 1951 ...”

“... as the Lucas van Leyden, a painting I find ravishing but can’t find much to say about, is John Sell Cotman’s Greta Bridge, a watercolour in the British Museum. I was brought up on Cotman, in that they have a very good collection of his work in Leeds, most of it bequeathed by Sidney Kitson, who was so fond of the artist he was said to suffer from ...”

“... over for the last forty years of his life and failed to finish. When his literary executor John Callahan appended some of these jottings to the end of ‘Juneteenth’, the ‘novel’ he extracted from two thousand manuscript pages, he gave Ellison the last word: the final note reproaches the editor from beyond the grave, along with the readers ...”

“... had a bad stammer, and his puns were delivered with effort, after a period of voiceless struggle. John Clare described him approaching ‘a joke or a pun with an inward sort of utterance ere he can give it speech till his tongue becomes a sort of Packmans strop turning it over and over till at last it comes out wetted as keen as a razor.’ De Quincey ...”

“... must be partly the help more recently given by such learned work on the art of inscriptions as John Sparrow’s, whose Visible Words, Line upon Line and Lapidaria are gratefully quoted in this and the following paragraph. For some three hundred years after the mid-15th century, a new art born in Italy swept Europe, accompanying the greater visual ...”

“... out herds bred over centuries in Wales. Small farmers, whelped on Common Market subsidies and John Constable idylls, were being priced out of existence by agribusiness and Tesco. In time, the three of us – Karl, Seamus and me – decided to go out there partly to see what we could see but also as a way of spending time in company with people who shared ...”

“... couple were illustrious knights of the royal chamber of Richard II, Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, ‘the Castor and Pollux of the Lollard movement’, as the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane called them. Neville died just four days after Clanvowe, the inscription records, in October 1391. The Westminster Chronicle fills in the ...”

“... been brought up by her grandparents, both of whom died before she was nineteen. She had one child, John, with her first partner; two, Robert and Shannon, with her second; and two more, Chloe and William, with her third. By the time William was born, Christine had endured beatings, depression and at least one suicide attempt. She drank heavily and abused ...”

“... of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the enclosure of Marske Moor in Swaledale to create a new farm, Cordilleras. The farm and most of the fields round about were named after places in South America, Valparaiso, Cotopaxi, Sierra Pedragosa and so ...”