“... of the Sedley and Osborne families there, and later made it the scene of the sale that followed John Sedley’s bankruptcy, the sale at which Becky Sharp was outbid by Captain Dobbin for Amelia’s little square piano. (Building began in 1800, so Becky Sharp saw the square when it was quite new.) It would be, at best, a cosmetic exercise. There are too many ...”

“... In September 2004, the German sculptor John Bock turned the main gallery at the ICA into something like a giant treehouse, a cluster of cabins, platforms and dens bashed together out of plywood and hung about with tinfoil, blankets and washing-lines. To get between them you’d climb ladders and squeeze through tunnels, balance on walkways and clamber over hay bales ...”

“... the Pompidou Centre. The proposed new town of Hook in north Hampshire was never built, yet John Gold’s book about its planning became an advertisement for British urbanism: the cannily gauged illustrations persuasively suggest a place both modern and homely. The more or less contemporary new town of Cumbernauld became a different sort of ...”

“... was abrogating the sovereignty of the people. Not only was the entire Labour shadow cabinet under John Smith opposed to such a view, so too was a group that included Corbyn, Dennis Skinner and Bernie Grant. ‘It disoriented me a bit,’ Benn writes, ‘because you don’t like to go against your own people.’ Still, Benn felt he had no choice but to press ...”

“... publicity of the late 1960s. More often, though, smaller is better. The scorched, painted metal of John Chamberlain’s tiny Untitled (Light Bulb) from 1958 is a reproach to his later, grandiose crumpled car chassis. Many pieces are tchotchkes or small paintings, harder to associate with vast, unfinished lofts than with cramped Lower East Side apartments with ...”

“... the mirror, has an extraordinary pathos. All of the heads in the silver relief of the beheading of John the Baptist in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, which was not included in these exhibitions, are remarkable for their strong and varied expressions, especially the head of the executioner, which is well reproduced in the Washington catalogue ...”

“... counter to the slow march of figures, taking the form of silent communication between Christ and John, their contact barred by a stern Roman officer, as the Virgin Mary faints. Some of the later narratives in the nave (scenes from the New Testament twinned with the Old) achieve a similar intensity, reducing the action to minimal but memorable formulae, often ...”

“... Prince Mohammed bin Salman to William Henry Gates III.Writing about Gates in the LRB in 1999, John Lanchester described him as ‘the apotheosis of the nerd type’. No one, least of all Gates himself, has ever maintained the delusion that his nerdiness somehow makes him cool. (Fifteen or more years ago, I was walking home from the shops near Caledonian ...”

“... the flow and still the tremor. Concentration is key. I have to think into the motion.A man called John D. Pepper has discovered something similar in managing his problems walking. He addresses his problems with walking by walking: fifteen miles per week in three sessions of five miles each at a pace of four miles per hour. Four miles per hour is a faster pace ...”

“... in the rock-leaved Bible of geology’. Those were the words of the pioneering geologist John Wesley Powell, who led the first expedition through the Grand Canyon in 1873. Thomas Moran, an experienced painter from Philadelphia, travelled with Powell, and had been to Wyoming and Montana with the US Geological and Geographical Survey two years ...”

“... they can invent big, loud people too. Monk has some difficulty in persuading his agent, Arthur (John Ortiz), to take 0n this extravagant book, but Arthur’s loyalty to Monk conquers his doubts. You can probably guess what happens next. The book is a huge success, taken to be an outstanding instance of what it was supposed to be mocking. Monk receives a ...”

“... than Labour – they don’t have to fear accusations of defeatism and a lack of patriotism. John Major continued the trend in the 1990s even as the navy argued vigorously for two new fleet carriers to replace the three small Invincible-class ships.This was effected under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and, after many delays and much cost inflation, the ...”

“... John Charles Robinson​ , perhaps the greatest connoisseur Britain has ever known, was turned down on four occasions for the post of director of the National Gallery. He was thought to be too closely associated with the trade (‘little better than a dealer’), and was known to have operated with scant respect for officialdom when employed by the South Kensington museum ...”

“... dress, the imposing Bowery had got himself up as Divine – his most obvious precursor – in John Waters’s film Female Trouble (1974). Looking conspicuously larger than usual, Bowery fell to the floor moaning and through his tights ‘birthed’ his naked friend (and future wife) Nicola Bateman. The umbilical cord was a string of sausages. The pair ...”

“... ends. All the British rocketmen talk of the pleasure of working with very high levels of energy. John Scott-Scott was a hydrodynamicist at Armstrong Siddeley Rocket Motors at Ansty near Rugby, who worked on conventional turbine engines before switching to rockets. He invented a turbo-pump incorporating a floating ‘cavitation bubble’ which could turn at ...”