“... lore had Warhol moving into bed with his mother while his father slept upstairs with Paul and John [Warhol’s siblings],’ Gopnik writes. When Julia moved to New York to live with her son, people ‘thought she was stupid’, a friend said, ‘but she was brilliant beyond belief … and much smarter than Andy.’In high school, Warhol was not known for ...”

“... said he had been happy ‘only after 1931, when he had carted his old followers, and could breathe freely the more spacious Conservative air’.In September 1936, Nicolson met the Channons at a party in Austria. They had ‘fallen much under the champagne-like influence of Ribbentrop … They had been to the Olympic Games and had not been in the least ...”

“... TV. The Beijing shooting marked the climax of seven weeks of student-led demonstrations, all freely reported on national and international TV news. Unhindered by the conciliatory overtures of the Beijing city authorities (the People’s Liberation Army supplied quilts, and the Beijing municipality set up portable toilets), the first demonstrators from ...”

“... my father, the Chinese Maritime Customs. But this work, much of it from the distinguished hand of John Fairbank, was mostly concerned with the 19th-century origins of the institution, shedding less light on modern times. For its more recent history, it was not even very clear where the records lay: the best contemporary guide to Chinese archives, produced in ...”

“... Sister Line, My Brother Lanoé’). She finished her first two plays, Un rat qui passe and John et Joe, in 1972. John et Joe, about two middle-aged idlers and the lottery ticket passed between them, was performed first, in 1975, at a dinner theatre in Neuchâtel. In many ways it’s an outlier: the dialogue shares ...”

“... the woman’s attitude. The effort is, in fact, too evident, with something readymade about the freely emotional language of her reflections. For her, as for the men, love offers an alternative to loneliness. The background of her life is exile from the Christian community in the Caucasus from which Amar brought her: ‘Jali was his father’s son; alien ...”

“... York’s Lower East Side, the whole family had appeared to be so unremarkable that the historian John Neville would say that ‘they might have been chosen at random from the telephone directory.’ Ethel’s father, Barney Greenglass, repaired sewing machines. Her mother, Tessie, was from Galicia (now part of Ukraine), and raised their four children in a ...”

“... marriageable age in the whole first generation of the Plymouth Colony’, and the ship’s cooper, John Alden, whom she chose over the colony’s military supremo, Commander Myles Standish – an episode that became the subject of a poem by Longfellow. The maternal line included heroes of the War of Independence and cousins who fought on opposing sides in the ...”

“... term applicable, and does it convey a single or coherent set of meanings? If we are to use it as freely as Gibbon’s critics did, or as Womersley does, we might extend it to mean the determination to accept only philosophical definitions of God, not exclusive of the possibility that no such definition could be constructed. But within this formulation a ...”

“... war; his personal interest was in peace, at least with the French, because then his income flowed freely. With his wife, he necessarily spent time in his own territories, but there was always the danger of being supplanted by new favourites, and the king tended to seek the company of younger men, the new tournament stars. A courtier had to be vigilant and he ...”

“... is the closest thing we have to a national industry. King Charles is a private landlord. John Lewis is a private landlord. The homelessness charity St Mungo’s is a private landlord. So are many MPs and, as Ruby found out, doctors.Landlordism has proliferated in tandem with soaring land and property values. A fifth of British homes are currently ...”

“... including Pompeo Batoni and Anton Raphael Mengs. She met and formed a lasting friendship with John Soane, but it was Henry Fuseli whose ‘extraordinary visions struck my fancy’. He inspired some of the best of her later work. Without her father, however, the family business did not flourish and her mother, of whom nobody, including Maria, seems to have ...”

“... ends. All the British rocketmen talk of the pleasure of working with very high levels of energy. John Scott-Scott was a hydrodynamicist at Armstrong Siddeley Rocket Motors at Ansty near Rugby, who worked on conventional turbine engines before switching to rockets. He invented a turbo-pump incorporating a floating ‘cavitation bubble’ which could turn at ...”

“... round number pulled out of a hat. In the New York Times the PR spokesman identified himself as ‘John Barron’. In the Associated Press story the same publicity man called himself ‘Donald Baron’ and was quoted as saying that ‘the merit of these stones was not great enough to save them.’ Both ‘John’ and ...”

“... in its exposure of the coming land-piracy that it seemed prophetic. It was efficiently directed by John MacKenzie, but the meat of the thing is in Barrie Keeffe’s script, his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as MacKenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by a slippery ...”