“... policy, not to the president. ‘Those bastards, we’ve got to cut them back,’ the Nixon aide John Ehrlichman declared. For the scientific community, an indispensable link between scientific thinking and government decision-making had been severed. The campaign to restore it began immediately: three years later, Gerald Ford welcomed scientists back to the ...”

“... reader. Duckworth have printed it in type about one size smaller than that of a Janet and John reader, and sub-titled it ‘one woman’s haunting psychiatric odyssey’. Morton Schatzman, who is the author of an interesting book on the 19th-century lunatic Daniel Schreber, has written it in fruitiest Reader’s Digestese, replete with remarks I doubt ...”

“... as anything else about him. (The idea was already becoming familiar in the performing world, where John Barrymore, notably, had played out the end of his career surrounded by idiot-boards as an openly bog-eyed parody of his younger self.) It was in the Fifties, then, that America’s taste-makers finally stopped resisting the attractions of dissolution and ...”

“... cold. Pepys looked at the megaliths in 1668 and shrugged: ‘God knows what their use was.’ John Aubrey, the first person to make a serious study of stone circles, put his finger on the problem: ‘These Antiquities are so exceeding old that no Bookes doe reach them.’ He developed a more effective method. Using measurements and comparative surveys of ...”

“... of saints’ stories by Jacobus de Voragine – and the late medieval English sermon collection of John Mirk. The Orthodox Church, concerned to regulate monastic communities, severely penalised any behaviour that compromised masculine identity: shaving off one’s beard, and thereby appearing feminine, received a worse punishment than soliciting another man ...”

“... of political science in That Noble Science of Politics (1983), cowritten with his late colleagues John Burrow and Donald Winch, which rejected the notion that a unidirectional, single-subject narrative was an adequate way of recounting a discipline’s history. The authors instead immersed themselves in unresolved contradictions: between deductive procedures ...”

“... Steffens: Es ist besser wie packin pants. As the Victorian Irish proved to the satisfaction of John Burns, however, not all victims of malnutrition and unemployment succumb to prostitution. The medical educationalist Abraham Flexner – evidently the anonymous ‘student’ whom Theodore Dreiser mentions in his introduction to Londres’s book – spent ...”

“... is found again in her commentary on the film Reds, which sorts out the ‘real’ history of John Reed and Louise Bryant from Warren Beatty’s ‘romantic celebration’; in her account of Lee Harvey Oswald as a ‘ghostly anachronism’ left over from the Depression years, and in her interest in English visitors to America. It’s apparent in her ...”

“... that Cannadine edits operate perforce at a much more basic level, and find it hard to take wing. John Davies’s essay on the Marquises of Bute and their dealings with Cardiff provides the vertebrae for a history of that city. The Bute initiative of the 1830s in equipping the coal export trade of South Wales with its infrastructure, mainly docks, was ...”

“... in logic and mathematics became known to the British mathematician Max Newman, and to the great John von Neumann in Princeton. He already speculated simultaneously on the foundations of mathematics, in Hilbert’s and Gödel’s sense, and on the conceivable capacities and limits of computing machines, and this combination of interests was his genius. He ...”

“... perhaps, figured in the great American Armory show of 1913, probably at the instance of John Quinn, the New York lawyer to whose patronage the Yeats family, as well as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, owed so much. Yeats mistrusted ‘the New’, although he knew well enough what was going on; and after what seems to have been a quite serious nervous ...”

“... is Richard Nixon, an embodiment of all that is best in the American character. By contrast, John Kennedy was a spoiled rich kid without principles or convictions, who thought he was above the law and ran around with glamorous women. Why, then, was Nixon’s Presidency a failure? The blame, Johnson contends, lies not with Nixon and the lies he told but ...”

“... like Knifegrinder and DJ Cormorant; Chef Macbeth with his remote-controlled planes; and sinister John Brotherhood, the focus for a series of portentous references to the Devil, and for stories of sexual depravity involving Siamese twins. Brotherhood says things like ‘Nails travelling at 300 m.p.h. can make quite a decoration on a child’s ...”

“... American realism, once a belief, is now an idle liberty. Writers such as Robert Stone, Joan Didion, John Irving and even Don DeLillo, are praised for their ‘realism’, for the solidity of their plots, the patience of their characterisation, the capillary spread of their social portraits, the leverage of their political insight ...”

“... loved. If one had to pick a mathematical genius at the furthest pole from Erdös, it might well be John Forbes Nash, 1994 Nobel Laureate in Economics, the subject of Sylvia Nasar’s biography. Where Erdös was impish, kind, open to all and monkishly pure, Nash was overbearing, secretive and abrasive, with a stormy marriage, an illegitimate son and several ...”