“... in the course of the drama; and, like every Chekhov central character, The Crucible’s John Proctor begins in a state of frustration and ends in a state of despair. Chekhovian in shape, The Crucible is Ibsenite in action. It is about a man with greater vision than his neighbours who ends up a scapegoat for ills he has warned against. This is the ...”

“... indirect style – though McEwan makes less use than Bellow of interior monologue – and, like John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ books, in the present tense. There’s also an allusion to Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ in the novel’s closing sentence (as McEwan pointed out in an interview on Radio 4), and the influence of Ulysses makes itself felt in several ways ...”

“... ended in disaster, when his camp was ambushed. One of his three companions was killed; another, John Hanning Speke, was badly wounded; Burton himself was pierced through the cheek with a javelin. Undaunted, he set off the following year to find the ‘Great Lakes’ of eastern central Africa in which he believed the river began. Travelling in blackface was ...”

“... origins. It was published by Henry Colburn in the New Monthly Magazine under Byron’s name. John William Polidori, Byron’s former physician, claimed it as his own and threatened a lawsuit to recover the rights to it; Byron disclaimed authorship. The magazine promised to correct its error and to compensate Polidori, but the correction was botched and ...”

“... There is a novel by John Masefield called ODTAA. Its title stands for ‘One Damn Thing After Another’. This would be a good title for a biography of George Gascoigne. Despite having a fine crop of literary firsts to his name (the first Italian-style comedy in English, one of the very first versions of a Greek tragedy in English, and one of the earliest systematic discussions of English metre), he was one of the unluckiest English poets ...”

“... one thought it odd that the real inner cabinet not only did not include the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, but comprised four spinners and only two responsible ministers. As Rawnsley points out, the curious thing about Blair is that, however much he wants to reject ideology, he is also endlessly eager to explain himself, to insist that there is a big ...”

“... concerned with postwar Japan highly classified, in violation of its own laws. Most important, John Foster Dulles, President Truman’s special envoy to Japan charged with ending the occupation, wrote the peace treaty of 1951 in such a way that most former POWs and civilian victims of Japan are prevented from obtaining any form of compensation from either ...”

“... leftist Students for a Democratic Society), as well as members of the staunchly anti-Communist John Birch Society (named for an American missionary said to have been killed by Maoists in 1945) and Southern whites alienated by the federal government’s role in eliminating Jim Crow. All of them pegged their hopes on the Arizona Republican senator Barry ...”

“... will not still be in power after the next elections. A similarly ill-founded optimism informs John Ghazvinian’s Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil. ‘Between the “scramble for African oil” and the “paradox of plenty”, there is bound to be a happy medium,’ he concludes. ‘And between the red roasting sun that cracks up its soil and the ...”

“... you are, sir: take this to your museum and tell them, this is ancient Rome.’ His Saint John on Patmos, one of the great moments in New York, is utterly alone in a landscape that teems with the evidence of people’s will to perpetuate their way of life. Cut stone is everywhere. The very slope of the hill is massively reinforced, so that the road ...”

“... Mary Patterson, married Lewis Sheridan Leary in 1858. The following year, Leary was recruited by John Brown for his suicidal raid on Harpers Ferry, and the bullet-riddled shawl that was eventually returned to Mary was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next ...”

“... where they can learn first-hand from crofters about the cultural landscape. Every year, my friend John Macaulay takes the group to his peat bank, as he took me in the 1990s, to show us the art of cutting and let us get the feel of the treisgeir slicing down into the wet peat. From him they learn the distinctions between the different layers of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Such a system could work, but only if the ruler was able to control his relations. Under John (r. 1118-43) and Manuel (r. 1143-80), the Comneni multiplied and ramified, with rivalries developing among their different lines. John spent his long reign trying to recover the large parts of Asia Minor that had been lost ...”

“... 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 ...”