“... especially in its literary/dramatic forms, has been a story of kings.) With the exception of King John and Henry VIII, Shakespeare’s English history plays have survived not as one series but two. The first works its way from Henry VI to Richard III. The second turns back into the past to cover the prequel reigns from Richard II to Henry V. It is hard to ...”

“... an expression of Britain’s shifting ‘governing traditions’. Both quote from the memoirs of John Robert Clynes, Labour leader between 1921 and 1922 and lord privy seal in 1924. Reflecting on meeting George V, Clynes could ‘not help marvelling at the strange turn of Fortune’s wheel’ that had brought him and his colleagues ‘to this pinnacle beside ...”

“... Court – all the justices save Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The fact that John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor are all Catholic may speak to the idea of diversity and variety within the Church, but it also shows how little Catholics in America have in common with one ...”

“... was content to work within the parameters of her chosen form – but not entirely content. John Lanchester, writing in the LRB of 20 December 2018, pointed to Agatha Christie’s focus on technical experiment as the key to her global appeal, securing a readership of a magnitude that dwarfs the scale of James’s own impressive career. Christie had no ...”

“... was widely mourned. ‘His tireless work to deliver safe consumption rooms,’ the first minister, John Swinney, said, ‘leaves an important legacy which will be remembered.’ By the time the Thistle opened this year, the tide seemed to be changing in many countries, with abstinence-based schemes on the rise and SDCFs branded as ‘state-sponsored ...”

“... Waldron calls a ‘laundry list of principles’. Fuller’s list is the most famous. Joseph Raz, John Finnis and Tom Bingham follow Fuller in proposing eight principles. Others have been more parsimonious: A.V. Dicey had three principles; John Rawls had four. Waldron pokes fun at this approach – ‘Robert Summers holds ...”

“... he warned. ‘The wave of population will break upon that shore, and roll back upon itself.’ John Maynard Keynes, who made no secret of his admiration for Malthus, attributed the First World War and the Russian Revolution to overpopulation and global competition for food. The ‘great acceleration’ of the second half of the 20th century, a period of ...”

“... and not everyone wanted the whole thing). The poem appears to have been known in some form to John Ball, one of the leaders of the Great Rising of 1381. Copying always changed texts: scribes made deliberate corrections and accidental mistakes and often translated into their own dialects. Scholars no longer understand these changes as corruptions of a ...”

“... offer an opinion, but in The Warrior he quotes a former Wimbledon semi-finalist, the US player John Isner, who says that Nadal is ‘the greatest competitor in any sport in the history of the world’. In a field stratified by the hard evidence of rankings and results, how can value judgments be so hard to prove? There’s broad consensus about the ...”

“... and he wasn’t the only violent misogynist at large on the island. There was her former classmate John Stickney, a bomb enthusiast who blew himself up while stalking his ex-girlfriend. There was her near neighbour, George Waterfield Russell Jr, aka the Eastside Killer, who was apprenticing as a prowler and peeping Tom during the same period, before killing ...”

“... of nature which grow within a man marked for decline. Artists such as Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, John Piper and Graham Sutherland depart from his text, and while it is tempting to quote the manner of their going it is more illuminating to give a sample of the way in which he addresses himself to the much more difficult task of describing the nature of a ...”

“... through diet and frequent defecation. From his base at Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, John Harvey Kellogg, physician, dietary reformer, founder of the breakfast cereal empire and author of such tracts as ‘The Itinerary of a Breakfast’, proselytised against the debilitating consequences of ‘civilised’ diet, leisure and defecatory ...”

“... possession of a sailing boat built for him at Genoa. ‘It cost me 80l.,’ he wrote to his friend John Gisborne in June, ‘and reduced me to some difficulty in point of money. However, it is swift and beautiful, and appears quite a vessel. Williams is captain, and we drive along in this delightful bay in the evening wind … until earth appears another ...”

“... phrase in Rimbaud, the last line of a prose poem called ‘Parade’, ingeniously translated by John Ashbery as ‘Sideshow’. The poem describes a set of frightening ‘robust rascals’, young and old, who appear to be street performers.They act out ballads, tragedies of thieves and demi-gods … and resort to magnetic comedy. Their eyes flame, the blood ...”

“... This ought to be a good novel, for it is by a good writer and deals intelligently with a bit of British history that continues to interest us. And it certainly gives pleasure; so it seems a shade ungrateful to be asking what’s wrong with it. Is this all? Is this the best a lively imagination can make of the plight of the virtuous spy, whether wild or sober, dedicated or not, Blunt or Burgess? There is nothing much here to conflict with the stereotypical idea of the Thirties, the afternoon men in their Soho clubs and hideouts, their lust for working-class boys, their not wonderfully well-informed Marxism, and their easy way of arranging matters to suit themselves, whether in the choice of wartime careers, say at Bletchley, or perhaps in some other establishment where scraps of secret could be salvaged to keep their Russian contacts happy ...”