“... us.’ From here on the letters become even more ardent; about two-thirds of those selected by John Tyrrell are from the last 15 months of the relationship. Janácek went on to explain more about his feelings to his wife, and wrote to Kamilá that he felt things drawing towards a decision. She wrote back to him: ‘I’ve not longed for anything else, my ...”

“... had become essential to the modern electoral campaign. Everyone remembers the young and handsome John F. Kennedy’s triumph in televised debates with his rival Richard Nixon. According to legend, Nixon lost the 1960 election by his refusal to put on makeup before the broadcast. One of the more subtly interesting moments in Mad Men occurs when we see an ...”

“... of history the history of political thought has travelled since the middle of the 20th century. John Pocock is often associated with the Cambridge School, with good reason. He took his doctorate at Cambridge, where he came into contact with Laslett, and has played a leading role, alongside Skinner, in the contextualist revolution. Yet his formative ...”

“... enterprise has not failed to show itself in the most favourable light. Thus in the Crimea Uncle John has carried his railroads with him, and the locomotive is used there to wheel up shot, shell and other implements of war … from the camp in the Crimea, to the War Office in London, the Commander in Chief now reports direct the state of the siege every few ...”

“... of America for its behaviour in Vietnam could have implications for sterling. On 16 June 1965, John Stevens of the British Embassy in Washington wrote that ‘the administration still do not think that a devaluation of sterling would bring down the US dollar but this attitude may change as their hopes of strengthening the US balance of payments are ...”

“... Irish, many of them young women. Among its employees was my grandfather Sean (known in Britain as John), who drove a District Line train until ill-health forced him to retire in the 1970s. Irish muscle was most useful to the expanding building trade, reviving the clichéd image of the Irish navvy. The Irish were good workers who took pride in the belief that ...”

“... understanding of what is personal in America. Willy Loman is a grandson of Tom Sawyer, just as John Proctor is a kinsman of the upholders of the Scarlet Letter: they are each sons of the singer of himself in Walt Whitman, or of the powerful American addressee, Ishmael. Loman bears a relation to the figment and self-projection that is Jay Gatsby, as much as ...”

“... this a step further by imagining a creature sparked to life from animal bones. Byron’s physician John Polidori (commissioned by John Murray to provide the press at home with scandalous gossip) read aloud the notes he’d taken at lectures by the anatomist William Lawrence, who had been widely attacked for arguing that the ...”

“... shells on mountains, but the Flood was itself thought of in a variety of ways. Writing in 1695, John Woodward, an English physician and fossil collector, proposed that it resulted from a temporary suspension of gravity, during which all the materials of the Earth were churned up into a thick suspension. When gravity returned, the materials settled into the ...”

“... What​ have the Romans ever done for us?’ John Cleese asks in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. His audience, not realising his question is rhetorical, replies: aqueducts, sanitation, medicine, public order, etc etc. Guy de la Bédoyère, on the other hand, doesn’t need a list: the Romans’ most important legacy, he suggests in his new book, is literacy, and specifically the habit of written memorialisation ...”

“... shock of his election, that we’re all actually married to him, and living inside his house. In John Ford’s morbid late Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the sociopathic highwayman Liberty Valance, played by Lee Marvin, senses an instability in the American recipe wherein law-abiding civilisation (represented by Jimmy Stewart) and wilful ...”

“... Club, still one of the Washington elite’s favourite watering holes, was founded in 1878 by John Wesley Powell, a devoted Humboldtian, who named it after his hero’s last great work. Over time, Humboldt’s prominence in America declined. In part this was because the popular image of the scientific enterprise had changed; by the end of the 19th ...”

“... black hair and dark moustache, produced a quirky resemblance to Lenin. Although his biographer John Bew finds the likeness ‘somewhat forced’, he notes that contemporary observers as different in their politics as George Orwell and the Daily Mail made sport with the superficial similarity. The British Lenin might all too easily have become the David ...”

“... Kentridge’s subject: the art-commissioning body for the World War One centenary gave the job to John Akomfrah, whose three-screen installation, Mimesis: African Soldier, is on show at the Imperial War Museum in London.Akomfrah, born in Ghana in 1957 and famous for his video/sound explorations of migration (mostly forced migrations, including slavery), the ...”

“... postwar security of the Pacific. Following this logic, on the day after Nagasaki was obliterated, John J. McCloy of the War Department asked Dean Rusk and a colleague to go into a spare office and think about how to divide Korea. They chose the 38th parallel, and three weeks later 25,000 American combat troops entered southern Korea to establish a military ...”