“... story. It happened that Vidal had information on this subject: both Stephen Spender and John Lehmann had been told by Hugh Walpole – in identical words, apparently – of an occasion mentioned by Edel. Walpole, then young, beautiful, and awed by the Master, had offered himself to James. After a moment of hesitation, James shuddered and ...”

“... agreement with Hamas. On this occasion, in a sharp departure from precedent, US Secretary of State John Kerry explicitly blamed Israel for the breakdown in talks. His special envoy, Martin Indyk, a career Israel lobbyist, blamed Israel’s insatiable appetite for Palestinian land and continued expansion of the settlements, and handed in his resignation. The ...”

“... Paul’s Letters to His Kinsfolk, was a bestseller. Another antiquary who was at Hougoumont, John Gage (1786-1842), left an account that is more personal and more chilling than Scott’s, in a journal kept during a visit that was, for him too, a first taste of foreign travel. Gage was 29 in the summer of 1815. From an old-established family of Suffolk ...”

“... four, five, they were still crossing, and I beeped on six.The traffic signal was invented by John Peake Knight, a superintendent of the South-Eastern Railway, and the first was installed outside the Houses of Parliament in 1868. They have always been objects of dispute, and even of irony: the first one exploded one morning, due to a leaky gas ...”

“... to put up with. The author’s note in The Sweetest Dream is more than a metafictional trick, like John Ray Jr, PhD’s foreword to Nabokov’s Lolita, the outsider’s perspective on the mad and repellent Humbert Humbert, telling us it’s all right to sit back and enjoy the perversions of others. This is Doris Lessing: not playful, not one for fun, the ...”

“... most strongly. He first took it in London, a city he hated, having come from Tangier to consult John Yerbury Dent, an addiction specialist who was the main proponent of the apomorphine cure. Dent saw drug use as a means of combating the crippling effects of anxiety, and believed that addiction was a disease and the addict should not attract moral ...”

“... bottles, he was being much funnier with werewolves and tigers. Our little dialogues were between John and Mary; his, and how much better, between Bertie van Tahn and the Baroness. Even the most casual intruder into one of his sketches, as it might be our Tomkins, had to be called Belturbet or de Ropp, and for his hero, weary man-of-the-world at 17, nothing ...”

“... dance was structured episodically: it included a runaway slave, scenes from Harper’s Ferry and John Brown’s execution, and a play within a play of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Graham incorporated all of these elements into her scenario. She also added biblical quotations to link the episodes. The first two lines read: ‘This is a legend of living in the ...”

“... order of service is a scream,’ I said. ‘A reading from The West Highland Railway by John Thomas?’ ‘Well, there you are.’ ‘Also a reading from The Liverpool Repertory Theatre, 1911-34. Followed by a bit of Macaulay’s “The Passing of the Second Reading of the Reform Bill”, read by Lord Mayhew. Address by Alasdair Milne, Director ...”

“... the Ottoman-controlled Aegean. In the years that preceded the founding of Jamestown in Virginia, John Smith had fought Ottoman armies in Eastern Europe and spent time as an Ottoman captive. It’s no surprise, then, that many of the conceptual frameworks that European colonisers applied to the Americas derived from their encounters with Muslims at home: they ...”

“... John Maltby​ , the studio potter and sculptor, used to say that you can’t make a teapot about your father’s death. Grayson Perry’s whole career assumes the opposite, that you can express any amount of personal and social comment through traditional forms of craft, not just pottery but tapestry and textile design: the Tate sells a printed silk headscarf of his that wouldn’t look out of place in a county town on market day, but represents contemporary art as a sort of board game, with arrival at the Bankside holy of holies (above the cheeky caption ‘Tat Moderne’) the winner’s reward ...”

“... patiently, so that we might consider them too. (Other poets attached to similar theories – John Wilkinson, say – pursue them aggressively, rapidly, with the kind of pride that comes before a fall.) ‘We wake up to an empty room/addressing itself in scare quotes,’ as one poem has it; Armantrout’s style puts everything in scare quotes, including ...”

“... becoming an annual tradition. We went through Slough, and one slogan we chanted was a riposte to John Betjeman’s poem, with its call for ‘friendly bombs’ to fall on the town: ‘Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Slough – THINK NOW!’In the summer Charlotte worked in London as a volunteer for the Africa Bureau, an anti-colonial think tank and part of the ...”

“... of information legislation was introduced by the Swedish parliament in 1766. Two centuries later, John Moss pushed the Freedom of Information Act through the US Congress. American journalism forums are often peppered with tales of FOIA intransigence. In his quixotic new book, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act ...”

“... to be assigned to the right bodies, but not necessarily, it transpired, at the right angle. Saint John, who had become known as the Melancholy Saint because of his downcast gaze, has emerged from the Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France looking more cheerful now his face points the right way, and he and the others have been thoroughly ...”