“... suggests that the most attractive thing to Tolstoy about such a relationship was that it took him away from sex, not towards it. But when Chertkov launched a press with the aim of distributing cheap editions of Tolstoy’s writings for a huge public, Sonya feared for the children’s inheritance. When he ...”

“... of its offices: ‘At this location, 122 Commerce Street, was a very large warehouse owned by John Murphey, who provided support to the slave traders in the city.’ ‘I would have preferred not to have the additional markers,’ the mayor confessed, ‘but I believe they are part of history.’ He agreed to allow them, he said, because they would ...”

“... cannot be unseen’.Certainly Schmitt couldn’t unsee it, though he turned it on its head. He took Bosch to be a painter of enmity, not love, and understood the prime enemy in The Garden to be ‘the egomaniac’, as figured in the central panel of human commingling: ‘This is nature and natural law, suspension of self-alienation and self-externalisation ...”

“... Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen ...”

“... uncannily familiar figure of my old acquaintance the doctor, Buñuel’s pal José-Luis Barros. It took me a while to place the recognised face, and of course I didn’t fill in all the details even then. A few years later I met Buñuel in Mexico. He was delighted when I told him the story – he loved coincidences – and thought it would have been even ...”

“... targeted the kitchen first, and acquired a few ginger biscuits which were too hard to bite into. I took them upstairs and placed them under my pillow. I moved on to the other rooms, all of which had the same indifferent smell of absence. In the master bedroom, I found a jewellery box sitting on a vanity table. It was empty, but gradually, I found some treasure ...”

“... After the appearance of Poems of Mr John Milton in 1645, Milton published no further works of poetry until Paradise Lost in 1667. During the intervening decades he devoted almost the whole of his literary energies to attacking the Stuart monarchy and defending the creation of the English commonwealth and, later, the Cromwellian Protectorate ...”

“... chemistry dominate both Holmes’s history and the period itself, but Holmes is interested too in John Herschel, William’s son, who nearly became a lawyer instead of the founder of the Astronomical Society; in Nevil Maskelyne, the astronomer royal at the Greenwich Observatory; in Mungo Park, the African explorer and the first European to reach the Niger; in ...”

“... to keep impersonators and spammers (‘fakesters’) out of its network. Its strongest successors took opposing tacks: Facebook started as a controlled adjunct to existing communities, MySpace as an alternative to those communities, an online world that appeared to have no rules at all. The characters in Stealing MySpace are even harder to like than those in ...”

“... Elena Kagan, Barack Obama’s nominee to replace the retiring Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee in late June. Before she is confirmed by the committee, she will have to answer questions about her views on the constitution and her lack of judicial experience ...”

“... be at the actual scene of the killing to be found guilty and sent to jail,’ Detective Inspector John McFarlane said after the conviction of 17 of the 20 young people jointly charged with the murder of 15-year-old Sofyen Belamouadden at Victoria Station in March 2010: ‘the law on joint enterprise is clear and unforgiving.’ To be found guilty of murder as ...”

“... Stevens’s Collected Poems came out in the mid-1950s. It was ‘a major imaginative event’, John Hollander said, and John Ashbery – in his first piece for the New York Review of Books – hailed Ammons as an ‘American original’. ‘I was born big and jaundiced (and ugly),’ Archie Randolph Ammons wrote, ‘on ...”

“... between the leaders of Britain and America was dogged by tensions neatly characterised by John Grigg when he wrote that Churchill became jealous of Roosevelt’s power, while Roosevelt was envious of Churchill’s genius. Grigg took the view that the prime minister ‘resented his enforced subordination to a man ...”

“... an admission that the quest might be disastrous. So it only seems to be a story about Scottie, or John Ferguson (‘Scottie’ is a curious name, like that of a small dog). Scottie is a police detective until, unmanned by vertigo, he allows a fellow cop to fall to his death in the course of a rooftop chase in San Francisco. Did the police force not know about ...”

“... conceptualised witchcraft as a conspiracy against an established monotheistic religion. Pope John XXII (1249-1334) was an enthusiastic enemy of witches and magicians, and his actions against them – issuing injunctions, launching investigations, executing malefactors – caused reverberations as far away as Ireland. There, Petronilla de Meath ended up ...”