“... tell me.26 January. We are comfortably ensconced in our Weekend First seats at King’s Cross when John Bercow comes along the platform. Not quite the elegant, slightly flamboyant figure one sees in the Commons, he’s in a scruffy suede jacket and, according to the trolley attendant, sitting in standard class, where he is happy to have a conversation about ...”

“... to say rival) in this quest is Scott Eyman, an American expert in movie history. His book on John Wayne from 2014 is extraordinary for its revelation of awkwardness in a cinema celebrity. Eyman has also written excellent books on Ernst Lubitsch, Cecil B. DeMille and John Ford, and about the moment when sound changed ...”

“... money I spend on advertising is wasted,’ the 19th-century Philadelphia department store pioneer John Wanamaker supposedly said. ‘The trouble is, I don’t know which half.’ Today’s huge volumes of data don’t necessarily bring as much clarity as one might imagine. Everyone in the business would agree that the effects of what they call ...”

“... had the classic Germans before him; Alexander von Humboldt came more readily to his mind than John Locke did. The issues between us, Leibniz said of Locke, are matters of some importance; he referred to Plato the good guy and Aristotle, not so good. Many of the nature/nurture arguments seem also to recapitulate the scholastic Christian and Muslim problem ...”

“... had experienced group sex at Sandstone, the quasi-intentional community founded by John and Barbara Williamson in Topanga Canyon, California. Up to twenty people lived there, hosting regular parties on Wednesday and Saturday nights at which attendees (mainly couples, who paid to be members of the club) could have sex with whomever they ...”

“... before a special jury, at Warwickshire Assizes. The defendants included the venerable Major John Cartwright, the ‘Father’ of English Reformers; the editor of the Radical Black Dwarf, T.J. Wooler; and Edmonds, the secretary of the Birmingham reformers. Their offences arose out of the same context as the Peterloo meeting in support of manhood ...”

“... Her topic makes most sense when the details of diplomacy are placed in a wider context.In 1836, John Stuart Mill claimed in an essay that Lord Melbourne’s government had become ‘smitten with the epidemic disease of Russophobia’, an irrational panic that had triggered an unnecessary increase in defence spending. ‘Russophobia’ has never quite left ...”

“... display the arc of a ball’s flight from the moment it’s struck to its distant landing. Golf, John Updike wrote, is of all games ‘the most mystical, the least earthbound, the one wherein the wall between us and the supernatural is rubbed thinnest’. I’m not sure about that. To witness (or in the unlikely event execute) a decisive action in pretty ...”

“... of the Washington Post, but it never occurred to him that he could actually close the paper. John F. Kennedy took a different tack, mugging up on things that individual journalists might like to be praised about. He understood writers’ egos, and major hacks visiting the White House would be greeted by JFK as if they were just the adviser the country ...”

“... of Pinel and Chiarugi on the Continent, but domestic parallels as well, such as the work of John Ferriar at the Manchester Lunatic Asylum in the 1790s, or of Edward Long Fox, from whose Bristol madhouse Tuke recruited Katherine Allen, the Retreat’s first matron. In what ways does Porter claim to go beyond this? First, by widening the circle of those ...”

“... the giant vigilante organisation which centres on Pietersburg. Founded by a black businessman, John Magolego, Mapogo now has 35,000 paid up members, 10,000 of them white – it’s a booming business. It moves into an area, rounds up criminal suspects, beats the hell out of them, drags them behind vans on rocky roads or dangles them over crocodile-infested ...”

“... Department officials. It offered ‘balanced’ debates on the issues between far right hawks like John Tower, and moderate hawks like John Mearsheimer, and rigorously excluded the views of anti-war representatives. (CNN’s subsequent release, via Turner Home Entertainment, of videotape ‘highlights’ of its war coverage ...”

“... as the debating triumph it would have achieved would have come at too high a political price. John Major’s government survived its Commons ordeal on Scott because of the decision to abstain by the three members of Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party. One of the three, the Reverend William McCrea, was reported as having asked, shortly before the ...”

“... for Israel, reputedly ‘good’ with black people, he is moreover young and once shook hands with John F. Kennedy. At the bar of the Sheraton Wayfarer in Manchester, the HQ of the travelling press corps, most correspondents report that their editors only want good news about the new consensus candidate. And, generally, that’s what they have been getting and ...”