“... among the English middle classes, the early 20th century was a more genteel time than the 1750s. John Somerville, a youngish English archaeologist, digging in Mesopotamia in the spring of 1914, thinks he may have discovered evidence that would definitively resolve a number of uncertainties in the history of the late Assyrian Empire. Since those uncertainties ...”

“... bouts of illness, contributing to the dispatch and defeat of a British force at Coruña under Sir John Moore. Canning genuinely believed that the war would be lost unless Castlereagh was removed. He was generally supported in this view but was balked by the indecisiveness of the prime minister, the 71-year-old Duke of Portland, a favourite of George III. This ...”

“... went up, and in May 2007 Fianna Fáil won a third consecutive term in office. As the columnist John Waters said, ‘people chose to take the most benign view of Bertie Ahern’s situation because they thought he was a steady hand on the tiller economically. They didn’t trust the opposition, so they translated that into a trust in his integrity.’ Ahern ...”

“... over only as a desperate jauntiness because the mood isn’t light but elegiac and, thanks to John Scogin, the 15th-century jester who haunts the book, malicious. Barker seems to identify with Scogin’s sense of humour, which is everything she wants her novel to be – disruptive, chaotic, violent, gnomic but not funny. The suspicion is that Barker has a ...”

“... is harder to create, and more easily destroyed, than Mitchell seems to realise. The result is what John Updike called a ‘million dollar penny dreadful’, a work that is admirable only if you think that ambition and vitality trump every other literary ...”

“... and both echo principles shared with them by a third experimenter, the chemist and astronomer Sir John Herschel. It was Herschel who first used ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ to name the two distinct stages of photographic depiction, and Herschel whose investigations ultimately made it possible to capture the vagaries of light. In brief, what Herschel ...”

“... in a Bond film or is it an allusion to, say, the opening of For Your Eyes Only, in which Blofeld (John Hollis) traps Bond (Moore) in a remote-controlled helicopter until Bond takes control of it, scoops up Blofeld’s wheelchair with the chopper’s leg and dumps him down a chimney? (This was Bond at peak camp; before the big drop Blofeld begs: ‘We can do a ...”

“... executing him; in Eileen, plot arrives in the form of a tall redheaded woman called Rebecca Saint John whose unexplained, shining presence Eileen recognises as ‘my ticket to a new life’. Rebecca – not all that different from Du Maurier’s Rebecca – has arrived from Harvard to set up an educational programme for the lost boys at the detention ...”

“... for small reward he was teaching me geography in Edinburgh) and Robin Robertson, or the Irishman John F. Deane, or now the American Patty Crane. They were drawn by the small vocabulary, the short sentences, the largely transferable word-order, the language that seems to pay twenty shillings to the pound – darkness, stone, light, tree, cold. You feel the ...”

“... The first recorded discovery of such an object occurred in June 1797 when the English antiquary John Frere caught sight of two marvellous examples deep in a hole dug by brick workers in Suffolk. Convinced that these were ‘weapons … used by a people who had not the use of metals’, Frere traced them to ‘a very remote period indeed, even beyond that of ...”

“... he been pronounced a traitor by James Clapper (former director of National Intelligence) and John Brennan (former director of the CIA)? How much more do you want? It didn’t strike them that these sources retained the dubious habits of exaggeration or distortion that had once prompted them to lie to Congress (in Brennan’s case, regarding the CIA ...”

“... all we can to protect. Get your third jab.3 DecemberListen to Rupert Beale discuss this piece with John Lanchester and Thomas Jones on the LRB ...”

“... scorn and contempt, either by laughter, or by words, or by gesture’. A few decades later, John Locke too ‘spoke against raillery’. It had ‘dangerous consequence if not well managed’ and he urged young people to abstain from it. He was a celebrated mimic, who took pride in his own wit, yet he considered jokes risky because they easily gave ...”

“... of artist friends and lovers. They also show her influences, from Walter Sickert and Augustus John to Wyndham Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, Dora Carrington and Post-Impressionism. She supported herself by working a few days a week at Fry’s Omega Workshops: one of the young women – ‘cropheads’, Virginia Woolf called them, on account of their distinctive ...”

“... notably, only her name is capitalised. The wittiest signature appears in The Birth of Saint John the Baptist (c.1635). A scrap of paper in the lower left-hand corner of the composition, crumpled and tossed onto the tiled floor, reads ‘ARTEMITIA’, presenting as a discarded first draft of Zacharias’s attempt to write down his newborn son’s ...”