“... presence of women. A 14th-century chronicle mentions the young women, nuns and widows kidnapped by John Arundel’s men and taken to sea during the Hundred Years’ War, sixty of whom were thrown overboard when the ships hit bad weather, the long-standing belief being that women brought bad luck at sea. Records show that a few Spanish women ...”

“... Cranach was paid for 60 pairs of portraits of the late electors of Saxony, Frederick the Wise and John the ...”

“... crucial date in the story of how colour entered the world of art photography is 1976, the year John Szarkowski, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, organised an exhibition of William Eggleston’s colour prints. Many people were shocked: first because the leading museum of modern art was willing to exhibit colour ...”

“... her mind Bishop knew things weren’t that rosy. She was also a novelist – the second cousin of John Irving, she often boasted – and in her three novels (so far unpublished) she was less confident of her prospects. The heroine of the most recent, Amazon Fever, is a female scientist at an Alabama university who is burdened by guilt over the death of her ...”

“... include one of Thomas Holcroft and William Godwin, as spectators at the trial of fellow radical John Thelwall, that shows every sign of being done swiftly, but delicately, on the spot; portraits like that of Mary Hamilton, made in 1789, show his flattering response to pretty women in full, early bloom. A study for Satan as the Fallen Angel shows why ...”

“... start, we find Hepworth and the other carvers of her generation – Henry Moore, Ursula Edgcumbe, John Skeaping – making common cause with a slightly older cohort, Jacob Epstein, Eric Gill, Gaudier-Brzeska, Elsie Henderson, Alan Durst. In works produced both before and after World War One, they began to remake the look and feel of the carving ...”

“... Tower at the novel’s opening, and who was based on Samuel Chenevix Trench, whom Oliver St John Gogarty (the model for Mulligan) met in Oxford. Chenevix Trench, Gogarty and young Joyce had lived in the Martello Tower at Sandycove in September 1904. Haines will always be the ‘ponderous Saxon … bursting with money and indigestion’, the ...”

“... have had much effect on the SNP’s thinking on independence. The deputy first minister, John Swinney, has said that an independent Scotland would keep the pound, even if it remained within the EU. Legally a second referendum could prove tricky, if not impossible. One alternative may be for Scotland to leave the EU with the rest of the UK, repatriate ...”

“... him as an apostle.) The 18th-century engraver George Vertue wrote a book about Thomas Simon; John Evelyn referred to him in Numismata, his discourse on medals, seals and coins. These objects, Evelyn wrote, ‘are the most lasting and vocal monuments of antiquity’. Proof, evidence and art are all involved, and in the 17th century proving who you said ...”

“... what she is.’ Sartre, wearing a suit on the beach at Copacabana, looks dreary beside her. John Updike in his dull dad jumper feels like a token inclusion, Hunter S. Thompson naturally stands out. His Hawaiian shirts and safari suits became so recognisable that Gary Trudeau turned him into the demonic Uncle Duke of Doonsbury, much to Thompson’s ...”

“... services are at high risk of failure by 2020. The report echoed the call made in 1828 by John Soane for ‘revision and speedy amendment’ to the old Palace of Westminster. He asked where a fire would be arrested. Six years later he was answered, as the great conflagration raged unchecked. Following the 2012 report, an independent consortium of ...”

“... Enola as part athlete, part scholar, part judo expert, and entire rebel. (One of her set texts was John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women.) However, 16 years were enough, and Mrs Holmes has taken off to start a new life. She might have told her daughter what she was doing – but she didn’t. Her brothers don’t recognise Enola at the station; they ...”

“... history of the screenplay is complicated, and it seems clear that Orson Welles, Mankiewicz and John Houseman all had a hand in it. Mankiewicz signed a contract that meant he would receive payment for his work but not get a credit; later, he managed to get his name, along with Welles’s, on screen. The film’s single Oscar went to both of them. They had ...”

“... writers believe too much in what they believe,’ she once told me – as well as what John Lanchester once identified as a ‘Russian horror of clarity’. It’s not that she doesn’t like clear prose, it’s just that she prefers it when writers don’t use that prose to know, in advance of knowing, what they think about everything, or to ...”

“... that fills the whole universe and the human soul’. By the 1950s, he had come to the attention of John Bennett, a British fossil fuel researcher and follower of the mystic George Gurdjieff. Bennett invited Subuh to Britain in 1957, and he returned to Jakarta with a coterie of new European and Australian disciples. In 1966 the movement set up a very ...”