“... of Feynman’s life – his relationship with Arline, with his parents, and with his mentors John Archibald Wheeler and Hans Bethe. But if Feynman was a genius, Genius fails to prove the ...”

“... in Australia’, Murray had acknowledged that all he claims for MacNamara can be claimed for John Clare in England at the same date. Of MacNamara’s ‘insouciant rhyming’, he says that it ‘can be seen as a proletarian version of Byron’s earlier manner, and it mimes the informality of a free settler’s hut rather than the fitted regularities of a ...”

“... than the licensed torture of a woman who knew women didn’t need men. By the time of John Badham’s 1979 Dracula, starring Frank Langella as ‘a Dracula of fusion’, the women have become ‘victims no more’, but passionate creatures liberated by his bite – seekers ‘who embrace vampirism as the sole available escape from ...”

“... rather than attempt to exhume a real hero of their own. They thought they could finish off poor John Stuart Mill, but they never succeeded, except in their own estimation. Now, however, we are faced with what may be an even more forlorn effort, to fold Thomas Carlyle to their collective bosom. It so happens that Carlyle had a famous quarrel with Mill, in ...”

“... in which these cultural chronologies are combined in the work of Yeats and Joyce, George Moore and John Synge, and even, in a curious manipulation, Wilde and Shaw. Yet, although this reading is brilliantly executed by Eagleton, an alternative view is possible. Almost all critiques of colonial literatures are predicated on the notion that they suffer from a ...”

“... that about an old man dreaming of a young girl’s beautiful feet, or just quaint like one about John Nash as a young painter, but the slow seriousness of the writing remains attractive. There are agreeable poems about cats, one called Little Blotter, and a lively curse poem. The ordinary is often made to seem excessively strange as when blackthorn blossom ...”

“... sense:The night we separated, my husband had a party in our house to which the Beatles, John Lennon, Stuart Sutcliffe – the one who died – and I can’t remember who else, came. The party went on for three days and nights; I moved out down the road to a friend’s house with the children, and later we divorced amicably. I never saw the Beatles ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 19th century – a good boy doesn’t throw his footman out of the window. The book is in the John Johnson Collection of Ephemera at the Bodleian, and this scene was pictured, as I recall, taking place in a panelled room – a prefects’ study, perhaps, or a dining club. Boys’ play, then. And although circumstances and contexts change, still ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... arranged for Jill Biden to pay a visit to a Coke job-training programme in Brazil, joined Joe and John Kerry for the unveiling of the Coke-sponsored 2014 World Cup trophy, and tagged along with Jill as part of a government delegation to Cuba, which happens to be one of only two countries in the world where Coke can’t be bought or sold (the other is North ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Herbert, fourth earl of Pembroke, with his family. His faithful transcription of Van Dyck’s Lord John Stuart and His Brother, Lord Bernard Stuart, thought to have been completed on site at Cobham Hall in the 1760s, is one of his finest achievements. Even Reynolds praised the copy as indistinguishable from the original. The vogue for Van Dyck was not without ...”

“... TV news host Tucker Carlson. In the absence of his third sacked national security adviser, John Bolton, the role of empire-minder has been taken over by Democrats and the anti-Trump media. (Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, accordingly averred that any withdrawal from Syria is as unthinkable as withdrawal from Germany or ...”

“... myths, and is temperamentally a northern island or isthmus dweller. In that respect he’s like John Burnside, to whom he dedicated his best poem so far, ‘At Roane Head’ (LRB, 14 August 2008), in which there is not just a selkie at the bottom of the garden but there might be a selkie in the bedroom that could cuckold you, or make you kill your children ...”