“... press, in an early and faint-hearted version of mutinies against discretion still to come, asked John Bullishly why a foreign-born consort should assume precedence over a daughter of King George VI. But this was as nothing to the squalor and piety which marked the Year of Grace 1955. In August, Margaret turned 25 and tried to pick up the threads with ...”

“... successive British Governments were well aware of this, as were the Unionists. In 1993, however, John Hume’s talks with Gerry Adams reached the point where an unconditional cessation of IRA violence became a real possibility and the Major Government was persuaded by Dublin to open the way for such a development by committing itself publicly to the Irish ...”

“... Davie’s mind as having an ‘experimental’ relationship with its contents, which Davie took to mean that he didn’t know how to think straight – and Donoghue does get Davie curiously wrong when he classes Thomas Hardy and British Poetry with Larkin’s Oxford Book of 20th-Century English Verse as arguing that ‘the Modernism of Eliot and Pound ...”

“... collective movements clean when they performed at the Barbican last month.* Whereas in the work of John Cage, whose music often accompanied Cunningham’s dances, randomness seemed a rediscovery of the sounds found in ‘nature’, most notably in the sounds of the quiet concert hall with which he filled 4l33ll, there was nothing natural about Cunningham’s ...”

“... New Writing 8, 1999), the extract was called ‘Brief Lives’. So a good starting point might be John Aubrey, but perhaps it would be better to begin with Anthony Powell, the standard biographer of the first great English biographer. In his introduction to Aubrey’s Brief lives, Powell points out a significant difference between his approach to biographical ...”

“... the motel. A solution was found. It appeared to favour the rugged party over the dandies and took the form of a new commission. The building would go up on a plot of public land across the river from the Palais de Chaillot, the home of the Musée de l’Homme. Chirac had got what he wanted without having to go begging. The arguments surrounding a new ...”

“... ethnic conflict. American reviewers have been unable to resist comparing Shteyngart’s book with John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces, though the two novels share very little beyond an omnivorous, obese hero who falls for a girl from the Bronx. Temperamentally, Misha Vainberg is Ignatius Reilly’s opposite. Reilly railed against the lack of ...”

“... to a personal ‘demon’, and the mild fascination with the occult shared by Pliny the Elder, John Buchan, and generations of ghost-story enthusiasts and horror-movie buffs? Pascal Boyer tells us in his opening chapter that ‘religion is about the existence and causal powers of non-observable entities and agencies.’ He doesn’t appear to have in mind ...”

“... the start a vehicle for philosophical inquiry. It also reveals how much Kuhn relied on what he took to be his exceptional talent for getting inside the heads of past scientists, to see their projects and their worlds in their terms. Steve Fuller’s book about Kuhn is somewhat odd, in content, style and tone. There is surprisingly little engagement with ...”

“... merely quaint. His legacy hasn’t worn well. Compared with his closest American contemporaries, John Singer Sargent (also working in England), Thomas Eakins (determinedly homebound) and Mary Cassatt (moving between France and America), Whistler seems lightweight. He possessed neither Sargent’s bravura as a portraitist at the centre of the Anglo-American ...”

“... if, in contrast to Newton’s theory of instantaneous action at a distance, gravitational forces took time to propagate. Laplace’s insight was that the cumulative effect of the planets on the Moon as well as on the Earth reduced the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit bit by bit over the centuries, causing the Moon to approach the Earth and reducing its ...”

“... are logarithms, a type of mathematical operation first described by the Scottish mathematician John Napier in 1614. If you are multiplying a number p by itself to get another number q, the logarithm of q to base p is how many times you need to do the multiplication to reach q. So the logarithm of 8 to base 2 is 3, because you have to multiply 2 by itself ...”

“... had exhibited his work – then entirely abstract – to acclaim in Paris, London and Amsterdam. John Ashbery, reviewing the paintings in 1961, admired their ‘breathless urgency’. But halfway through the decade Arikha experienced what he would later describe as ‘a violent hunger in the eyes’. Face to face with Caravaggio’s The Raising of ...”

“... and reviews: 160 pages followed by a cod-serious bibliography put together by his publisher, John Lane. The opposite approach, resulting in much the same title, was proposed by the very-much-not-dandiacal Gustave Flaubert, then 24, in a letter of 1846 to his friend Maxime Du Camp: ‘Very often, I doubt that I shall ever publish a single line. Wouldn’t ...”

“... 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 ...”