“... is to reclaim his house, which was seized by Settler Williams with the help of his servant, John Boy, both of whom pursued him into the bush, where they spent years tracking him until he finally managed to kill them. On his return, Matigari can tell almost immediately that nothing has changed. The country is still subservient to the Western ...”

“... conceptualised witchcraft as a conspiracy against an established monotheistic religion. Pope John XXII (1249-1334) was an enthusiastic enemy of witches and magicians, and his actions against them – issuing injunctions, launching investigations, executing malefactors – caused reverberations as far away as Ireland. There, Petronilla de Meath ended up ...”

“... democracy, one of the supporting pillars of the postwar order in Europe. Perhaps that is what Pope John Paul II was getting at in 2000 when he combined the beatification of Pope Pius IX with that of Pope John XXIII, convenor of the Second Vatican Council and hero of the ...”

“... between the leaders of Britain and America was dogged by tensions neatly characterised by John Grigg when he wrote that Churchill became jealous of Roosevelt’s power, while Roosevelt was envious of Churchill’s genius. Grigg took the view that the prime minister ‘resented his enforced subordination to a man whom he secretly judged his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Latin and published, it becomes clear how strange the poet’s Christianity was. The poet is John Milton, and the work is De Doctrina Christiana.De Doctrina Christiana matters because it mattered to Milton. You can ignore it and still enjoy his poetry, but if you become seriously interested in Milton your interest will sooner or later extend to his ...”

“... 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 ...”