“... by which the cognitive faculties were ‘suspended’ or shut down. When Prichard’s follower John Conolly, the celebrated superintendent of Hanwell Asylum, was asked by a judge in 1850 whether the accused was able to tell right from wrong, he replied coolly: ‘We medical men do not consider that a question of distinction at all.’ It was ...”

“... or Scottish privateers. Most of them worked as servants in London or in southern port towns. John Blanke was a trumpeter who performed at court. In 1509 he was present at the funeral of Henry VII and performed at Henry VIII’s coronation. Two years later he performed in the celebrations heralding the birth of Prince Henry, the longed-for son of Henry ...”

“... Congress barely peeped as costs soared – though there were a few notable holdouts, like Senator John McCain, who called it ‘a scandal and a tragedy’. McCain is a leading representative of a dissident American military tradition that prefers light and agile to massive and lumbering, but it may not be insignificant that his home state, Arizona, is one of ...”

“... catching the light in a different way, or note the yellow tunic of the figure I supposed to be St John with what felt like fresh, or better, vision. I wondered if the new emptiness that had fallen on the city had somehow added clarity to the art. As a good Catholic, I like the Crucifixion; indeed, I prefer it to the Resurrection, which always seems a bit too ...”

“... she gave throbbing lectures in spangled satin and Egyptian beads, and was painted by Augustus John in silks that don’t look too dusty. David Piper called it ‘the only existing humane portrait of a Lady Don’ and Harrison was pleased, thinking she looked ‘like a distinguished prize-fighter who has had a vision and collapsed under it’. Wade’s ...”

“... church (four services a day, six on Sundays), part tourist attraction, since the 1590s – when John Donne, not yet dean of St Paul’s, recorded that one of the vergers was charging visitors to see the royal tombs. The crucial events were the Reformation, when it lost its monks and lands and found its finances insecure, and Elizabeth I’s subsequent ...”

“... worth reading Seneca and Lucan alongside the Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse of John, which was probably composed around 100 CE. John casts Nero, infamous for burning Jewish followers of Jesus alive, as a seven-headed beast, who is defeated when he is thrown into a lake of fire. The book is not only a ...”

“... natives of the colonial imagination – a reversal of the book’s intention. Jeffrey Mehlman and John Leavitt generously suggest that the choice of ‘savage’ might have been an ironic reference to the anthropological vocabulary of an earlier generation, whose theories Lévi-Strauss had set himself to overturn. Maybe, but if so it didn’t come off, and in ...”

“... out that in fact he went back to England for a few years, where his time at Oxford overlapped with John Ruskin’s tenure as Slade Professor of Fine Art. Rhodes wasn’t there to hear Ruskin give his inaugural lecture – the one about England’s duty to ‘found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest ...”

“... flourishes harking back to past dramas of domestic discord, but Paulet’s great-great-grandson, John Paulet, the fifth marquess, had to use the fortifications for real. At the start of the civil war in 1642, Basing House’s aesthetic virtues were second to its strategic significance, namely its command of the main road heading west from London. To puritan ...”

“... the Government wavering, the Tyneham campaigners played their last card. Lord Fenner Brockway took John Gould, a road-sweeper who was already among Tyneham’s most symbolised villagers, to 10 Downing Street. A life-long member of the Labour Party, Gould presented Harold Wilson with a wreath made of ivy picked from the ruins of the cottage in which he had been ...”

“... even more productive of academic recognition, it has stirred a controversy about editorial method: John Worthen, one of the three editors of the Cambridge Women in Love, describes his approach in D.H. Lawrence in the Modern World and defends it in Essays in Criticism (April 1989). Yet, as H.M. Daleski points out in the same collection, Joyce has effectively ...”

“... minister, I’ll never again be as great as I was at Winchester.’ ‘Dick’ is immortalised by John Betjeman: Broad of Church and Broad of Mind, Broad Before and Broad Behind. ‘Dick’ competes with Auden for the affections of a rugby-player – I cherish this bit because years later, in a villainous wine-bar called the Bung Hole, Crossman told a group ...”

“... dismissed. Plato is by no means the only philosopher in our tradition to hold such a view. Here is John Locke on the subject of second-hand knowledge in philosophy and the sciences: we may as rationally hope to see with other men’s eyes as to know by other men’s understandings. So much as we ourselves consider and comprehend of truth and reason, so much ...”

“... laid out in the discourses he delivered as President of the Royal Academy. It was re-created by John Barrell in his influential Political Theory of Painting (1986). Drawing on J.G.A. Pocock’s politics of civic humanism, Barrell replaced the two traditions of painting with a tradition of academic theory – from Shaftesbury to Reynolds and so on – which ...”