“... compiled from four ebook novellas by Luke Jennings of the Observer, is called Codename Villanelle (John Murray, £7.99). Eve is going to become a target. But it’s nice to know that neither of the main women will die before the end of the first episode. It’s the men who are collateral damage, or might be: the men Villanelle is instructed to kill (by a ...”

“... given to jokes, even if his poems are often wry:As I sd to myfriend, because I amalways talking, John, Isd, which was not hisname, the darkness sur-rounds us, whatcan we do againstit or else, shall wewhy not, buy a goddamn big car,drive, he sd, forchrist’s sake, lookout where yr going.‘I Know a Man’ was included in Creeley’s first major ...”

“... Painters was ‘deliberately designed to cause the greatest possible antagonism’, as John Pope-Hennessey put it (the second volume, published in 1891, the year of Morelli’s death, is more collegial). Morelli’s nemesis, Wilhelm von Bode, the director of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, claimed it displayed a ‘most dangerous ...”

“... Ludvig Heinrich briefly became the governor general of the islands of St Croix, St Thomas and St John, moving to the governor’s mansion in Christiansted, the seat of Danish government in the West Indies, but then, in 1788, he resigned and returned with his family to Copenhagen. Emilia Regina travelled with them, and her son followed a couple of years ...”

“... commitment to the army (and, by extension, the nation) in extremis. The final exhibit is John Gilbert’s huge watercolour, The Queen Inspecting Wounded Coldstream Guardsmen in the Hall of Buckingham Palace (1856), at first sight a schmaltzy and fairly undistinguished representation of this unwritten contract. It’s not clear that this isn’t how ...”

“... to leave France in the face of royal prohibition, they continued to be busy and productive. John Houblon, from a Huguenot family which had arrived from France in a slightly earlier wave of Catholic persecution, became the first governor of the Bank of England in 1694 and a knight of the realm; until 2014, his luxuriantly bewigged features adorned our ...”

“... non-Li. It seems she is most drawn to Irish and Russian writers: William Trevor, Elizabeth Bowen, John McGahern; Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Gorky, though her pantheon is unpredictable and expands to take in Hardy and Mansfield, some oddly straightforward passages from the letters of Philip Larkin or the conundrum that is Marianne Moore (and her ...”

“... of guards and more generous budgets. In Frontier on the Rio Grande (1982), another geographer, John W. House, explained that the US Border Patrol in the 1970s was ‘derisorily small’: 1350 personnel (including teams looking out for ‘Chinese travelling on foot’). There are now 21,000 Border Patrol agents, large numbers of them posted along or near ...”

“... we existed’. But ‘Where the world ends, everything cut down’, the flowers become names: ‘John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown’. Although the collection’s title clearly refers to America’s tradition of racial violence, it also invokes another, less well-known poetic tradition, Black nature writing – which, as Evie Shockley writes in Renegade ...”

“... as punishment for looking into Persephone’s box of beauty, but revived by her lover, Cupid. John Philip Kemble revived Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in 1802 with his sister, Sarah Siddons, in the role of Hermione. At the end of the play, when Leontes is introduced to a statue of the wife whom he believes to be long dead, Siddons, draped in ...”

“... film also glosses over the fact that Dworkin’s life partner of more than thirty years, John Stoltenberg, was and remains an openly gay man – so it ends up suggesting, inadvertently, that Dworkin made some sort of peace with heterosexuality.) We see and hear Dworkin describing these assaults and the significance they had for her, and watch as they ...”

“... may be seen as a courteous but firm reproof to those who, like me, brought up on Arthur Machen, John Buchan, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Henry Treece, not to mention H.P. Lovecraft, got the wrong idea a long time ago and have been reluctant to abandon it. The wrong idea is the ‘widely held belief that the ancient pre-Christian religions of Europe ...”

“... an inmate’s sense of innate differences was often sharpened. When the Irish nationalist activist John Mitchel was transported in 1848, first to the hulks off Bermuda, then to a penal colony in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), one of his greatest torments was the perception that he was being treated no better than a West Indian slave. Escaping to the US, he ...”

“... I have been suffering at times I could/step away from it by embracing it, a blues thing,/ a John Donne thing, divest by wrestling, then sing.’ Rhyme may be ‘arcane’, a done thing, but what the blues and Donne (Seuss must be thinking of his sonnet that begins ‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God’) show us is that formalising pain can be ...”

“... were sponsored by the London Stock Exchange). The chairman of the Wider Share Ownership Council, John Harvey-Jones, provided a blurb for Investor: ‘I am delighted to acknowledge its contribution to the wider understanding, in an enjoyable way, of the opportunities for wider share ownership.’ Bankers and traders were portrayed in films, books, plays and ...”