“... sin; and a variety of peculiar rock formations were attributed to the activities of the devil. St John’s Well at Lutterworth in Leicestershire became Wyclif’s Well. Other sites were associated with the Protestant martyrs of Mary’s reign or with later evangelical leaders. A well in Shropshire was said to be holy because ...”

“... this deadpan claim to literary originality: Swift lifted these words from the Restoration poet Sir John Denham’s praise of Abraham Cowley: ‘To him no author was unknown,/Yet what he wrote was all his own.’ As it happens, it was Cowley’s rhapsodic style Swift began his career by imitating, so that (he bragged to a cousin in 1692) ‘when I writt what ...”

“... attended in Dobbs Ferry, about an hour’s drive up the Hudson from New York City. Her father, John Cheever, drove her to the school. ‘Joey!’ Cummings shouted when he spotted Cheever, whom he’d first met in the 1930s (‘Joey’ was Cheever’s boyhood nickname). Cheever remembered that first meeting: Cummings’s ‘last book of poetry had been ...”

“... Mark Micale’s book opens with a scene from John Huston’s film Freud: The Secret Passion (1962), which re-creates one of Jean-Martin Charcot’s legendary demonstrations of hypnosis before an audience of doctors at the Salpêtrière. With magical ease, Charcot makes two patients’ hysterical symptoms disappear ...”

“... sur l’origine et la nature du beau in an article on the Hollywood comedy directors John Hughes and Judd Apatow, while Cyril Béghin compares a shot in Avatar to Tintoretto’s The Finding of the Body of St Mark. The most famous of Cahiers’ early statements – and the one that most directly affected film history – was Truffaut’s 1954 ...”

“... of The Last English Poachers, written by Bob, his son Brian (also a poacher) and a ghost called John McDonald, is more punk than its predecessors’. The Robin Hood aspect is to the fore. The Toveys see themselves as the rural frontline in the class war, and their book is full of contempt for rural toffs, or ‘ya-yas’, also called ‘saddle-bumpers’ by ...”

“... as Hugh Casson later wrote, was ‘a performance’. Few people felt they knew what lay behind it. John Betjeman knew more than most and was probably Lancaster’s closest friend. They met at Oxford and soon realised that they shared a sense of humour and a passion for architecture which was the basis of an enduring friendship. When Betjeman became assistant ...”

“... now only of brains, hard-wired through natural selection to serve the interests of selfish genes. John Gray declares that morality is a ‘myth’ obscuring the fact that our existence has ‘no more meaning than the life of a slime mould’. David Brooks, author of the bestselling pop-science Bildungsroman The Social Animal, explains that his fictional ...”

“... as party leader also felt constrained to observe the Home Rule commitments of his predecessor, John Smith. Of course, once devolution had been achieved, matters were simpler: as members of a UK-wide party, Labour politicians in the new Scottish Parliament were expected to follow the party line dictated by Blair from London, notwithstanding the supposed ...”

“... tracing a line from Rimbaud through Futurism to Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein, Frank O’Hara, John Cage and beyond – who have advanced what she sees as modernist goals: above all, the up-to-date, sceptical investigation of the materials and ideas from which a work of art gets made. Though much of Perloff’s writing concerns the great dead, she became ...”

“... in the wetness and reach safety in the cafeteria at the summit. But a 34-year-old man called John Mattinson who left the same café half an hour later was struck by lightning and died. When she read about it in the newspaper, Meades’s mother said: ‘Well, if you will stand on a cairn in a thunderstorm …’ True to his interest in ...”

“... harmlessly away). Katharina’s case stalled until October 1616, when Einhorn sent a report to John Frederick, the duke of Württemberg, detailing the accusations against her, which now included hurting children. Ducal councillors ordered the governor to detain the suspect. But Katharina had already left Leonberg to be with her son in Linz. Katharina made ...”

“... when an unhealed wound remains? Not long before the vote, the point was cruelly rubbed in. John Howard’s Liberal-Coalition government made the unusual decision to invade its own country, by sending the Australian Defence Force into the Northern Territory. His aim was to deal decisively with concerns about child abuse and corruption among the mainly ...”

“... with their secretaries. I imagined there were sub-species of adultery going on, up and down John Dalton Street, Cross Street, Corn Exchange, but we never did matrimonial, or if we did the clerks locked the files away from me, so my most recent take on male duplicity came from the novels of Thomas Hardy. The 1960s were behind us, the era of free ...”

“... so devoted to ideals of womanly self-abnegation. After reading this book, and after revisiting John Sutherland’s biography of Mrs Humphry Ward, I felt the need to remind myself of John Stuart Mill’s incisive argument for women’s emancipation. Mill was as certain as the next suffragist that gender equality would ...”