“... poets discussed by Bridget Keegan – Ann Yearsley, Mary Robinson, Henry Headley and later John Clare – were all of one mind about this. Chatterton, they thought, had died by his own hand in poverty and despair, neglected by the metropolitan world. Michael Suarez’s account here shows that Chatterton’s relations with the book trade after he ...”

“... and so on. Those giveaway words were originally proscribed around 1956 by Nancy Mitford and John Betjeman, perhaps partly as a joke, but now served as infallible class markers: ‘It’s the way people like us don’t talk,’ Mum explains. There are things that must not be said or done, no reason offered or needed, and things that must be done, however ...”

“... the early 1870s, high-wheelers – later known as penny-farthings – were already whizzing up to John o’Groats from London in two weeks. Hundred-mile bike-rides at average speeds of 8-10 mph seem to have been quite routine. Herlihy’s entertaining history is full of similarly impressive figures but he rarely pauses to analyse them and has little to say ...”

“... were first precipitated from a universal ocean. Hutton’s prose was opaque, but his champion John Playfair ensured that the wider world appreciated his message. Not long afterwards, William ‘Strata’ Smith produced the first good geological map, using characteristic fossils as guides to rock formations. After some difficulties in getting the map ...”

“... Kempley, staff writer, of the 1991 movie Boyz N the Hood, written and directed by ‘homeboy’ John Singleton; in Kempley’s words, ‘a rude, insistent rap, an unflinching, often funny, always compassionate look at coming of age in Central Los Angeles’. The second is from a review ‘in the Atlantic Monthly or Harpers’ of Juanita Mae Jenkins’s ...”

“... Neither prize-winner, under the new regime, has been a crowd-displeaser, nor a crowd-puzzler. John Carey, a serious man except when he is writing literary journalism, chaired this year’s jury, and announced that he was in favour of ‘widening what might be looked on as the Booker’s scope’. He and his judges had, he thought, a preference for ...”

“... finally turns into majolica. The ‘plodding, patient, self-denying and taciturn’ apprentice John Heathcoat conjures the lace-making machine out of years of application, and lives to profit from it though besieged on right and left by patent-infringers and Luddites. The main point of these stories is to show how widely distributed talent is – or ...”

“... as an author photograph of him in existence, and such information as there is is recycled from John Fowles’s fighting introduction to this, his only book.) For a time in the 1920s he promised to be a literary figure, ‘the next D.H. Lawrence’ and then Lawrence’s intended biographer, but life had other, dimmer plans for him. The Book of Ebenezer Le ...”

“... prevailing over steel tanks and Israeli-made loitering munitions blowing up rusty 1960s Howitzers. John Antal, a retired US army colonel and military analyst, called it ‘the first war in history won primarily by robotic systems’. It’s true that Armenia’s Soviet-era air defence systems were no match for Turkish-built drones and other imported military ...”

“... known stronghold.In 1858, two English ornithologists went to see the great auk for themselves. John Wolley and Alfred Newton travelled to the south-west peninsula of Iceland, hoping to visit Eldey and return with some specimens to add to their collections. Newton even dreamed of capturing a live auk for London Zoo. But their trip was a failure. Bad weather ...”

“... scholar Ilan Stavans says he made it more American. Maybe, and not because he was trying to be John Berryman avant la lettre.) The chronology by Stephen Hart in Clayton Eshleman’s 700-page The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo (2009) is a compilation of Vallejo’s most atrocious dramas. A murderous riot, tragic love ...”

“... a Jewish manufacturing family called the Oppermanns; not Anthony Trollope, or Anthony Powell, or John Galsworthy, whose writing desk was purchased by Gabriele Tergit for the karmic storage of her manuscripts. These are books that have a strong narrative beat and keep you turning the pages by virtue of speed, coverage and pressure of events. The Effingers ...”

“... the island. The assumption was that Cuba would sooner or later fall from Spanish into US hands; as John Quincy Adams put it in 1823, ‘there are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation; and if an apple, severed by the tempest from its native tree, cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection ...”

“... any night from the Salvation Army or in any Bethel or Pentecost Chapel. If it is not Jesus, it is John. If it is not Gospel, it is Revelation. It is popular religion, as distinct from thoughtful religion. Palestine functioned as a timeless image for those of this conviction. It was a place where everything was mundanely known, but endowed with the potential ...”

“... had exhibited his work – then entirely abstract – to acclaim in Paris, London and Amsterdam. John Ashbery, reviewing the paintings in 1961, admired their ‘breathless urgency’. But halfway through the decade Arikha experienced what he would later describe as ‘a violent hunger in the eyes’. Face to face with Caravaggio’s The Raising of ...”