“... definition of ‘devirgination’. He was one of three of Murray’s readers to scrutinise John Bulwer’s 1650 Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d, or, the Artificall Changling; between them they submitted more than a thousand slips dealing with words relating to sex and bodily mutilation. The second of the three was an unnamed American living in ...”

“... world. Why should peers and baronets be prominent in the British elite of 2024? Take Sir (Walter) John Scott, 5th baronet, countryside campaigner and snuff manufacturer (‘chairman of Sir Walter Scott’s Fine Border Snuff, 2012-, chairman of North Pennine Hunt 2008-’). Google suggests that Sir John is a rather small ...”

“... London jury for a libel in a Greek paper whose London circulation was a few hundred copies. Elton John got a million pounds from the Sun, which had suggested he’d had a relationship with a rent boy. The wife of the Yorkshire Ripper was awarded £600,000 for an article, published six years before she issued her writ, which suggested that she had taken money ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Coleman went to Wellesley College and then married Loyd Ring Coleman. She gave birth to a son, John, in 1924, contracted puerperal fever, and was confined for two months as a mental patient in Rochester State Hospital. Recovered, she journeyed with her husband to Paris, where he worked in advertising. For a while Coleman wrote a society column for the ...”

“... and went, rightly, for astronomical fixes wherever possible. But even here error crept in. As John Noble Wilford reminds us, ‘even as late as 1740, it was estimated that not more than 116 places on earth had been correctly located by astronomical observation.’ When we also recall that Ptolemy had no method of accurate time-keeping, we can only marvel ...”

“... how this ‘Moriarty of the book world’ met his match in a duo of intrepid young book dealers, John Carter and Graham Pollard, whose investigation is ‘worthy of fiction’. The ‘impossibly debonaire’ Carter, with his immaculately pressed Savile Row suits, could easily be a real-life counterpart of Dorothy L. Sayers’s fictional sleuth Lord Peter ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and instinctively deceitful. When his father died in 1930, he erected a tombstone claiming that John Jesse Barnes had served the full four years of the Civil War, instead of an actual six months.Numerous friends and acquaintances testified to Barnes’s ‘complexity’. The painter Thomas Hart Benton, for instance, described him as ‘magnificent ...”

“... victory. This was later challenged by historians on the right such as Correlli Barnett and John Charmley, who claimed that the war was a calamity for Britain, with consequences from near national bankruptcy and humiliating dependence on American financial support to industrial decline, Soviet domination of much of Europe and the loss of empire.But ...”

“... or Panama, Burma or Irian Jaya, there is no trace of Orientalist condescension.Lewis’s friend John Hatt, who selected and introduces these articles, hasn’t set them in chronological order. But they carry their publication dates, starting in the early 1950s. And the dates show a progression, from presenting ‘un-English’ behaviour as essentially ...”

“... images to imprint themselves durably and remain fixed upon the paper’.Yet when the painter John Sell Cotman was given a camera lucida in 1817, he wrote to a friend that ‘they are used by all ye artists I find!’ The prolific Victorian sculptor Francis Chantrey used one to sketch three views of each of his sitters, which he would give to his ...”

“... button. Similar personalised emails were sent to dozens of Democratic staffers, including John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair. Podesta’s assistant forwarded the email to his IT officer, who replied that it was ‘a legitimate email’. He later claimed that he had meant to write ‘this is not a legitimate email.’ But the damage had been ...”

“... more directly answerable to the Crown and monarchy raised to a new level of adulation.That​ John Watts’s The Wars of the Roses: A Medieval Civil War is different from other books on the subject is clear from its subtitle. Watts’s intention is to tackle the wars diachronically, as an exercise in comparative history in which evidence from a civil war ...”

“... a negative condition into a positive possibility. ‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it,’ John Cage wrote in 1949; two decades later Nauman said, in effect, ‘I have nothing to do and I am doing it.’ Although this formulation isn’t as dire as ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on,’ Nauman does share with Samuel Beckett (another early influence) a ...”