“... opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of their baptisms is documented, nor the date of their ...”

“... of them are plotting murder. Nutshell-Hamlet’s father is a poet and publisher of poets called John Cairncross, living away from the marital home in hopes of a reconciliation with Trudy, though all he achieves is easier access to her bed for his rival. (The surname has a noble ring, though it is made up of two things that can mark a grave.) The house is a ...”

“... This idea of Wolfenden as a wash-out and the squanderer of a prodigious talent persuaded John Carey, one of his Oxford contemporaries, to find him ‘the least interesting’ of Faulks’s subjects. Not only does Carey challenge Faulks’s claim that ‘in some minor way he represented a generation’: he suggests he was ‘bizarrely ...”

“... motivated crimes from ordinary offences, through the establishment of a body of anti-terror laws. This Government has added a further dimension to the UK’s anti-terror legislation. Instead of using the criminal law as its basis, it has arrived at the solution of grafting anti-terrorist provisions onto immigration law. This means that there is no duty ...”

“... especially in Brenner’s work, according to which history is not driven by the transhistorical laws of technological progress, and historical evidence does not support the contention that each social form must be succeeded by a more productive one. This interpretation does not deny that there have been great advances in technology in various times and ...”

“... year. These new clients are people who, ‘like the rest of us’, as one of their volunteers, John Monaghan, says, ‘were living on 110 per cent of their salaries’; this year, something in the working situation has changed, and they cannot manage their usual debts, mortgage, car, credit card. Monaghan is also worried about the effect of the recent ...”

“... the dream of an Eden on earth. Yet this idyllic vision led to bloody tyranny in Münster, where John of Leiden massacred his friends and partisans before being put to death himself. Bosch​ displays a deep acquaintance with alchemy, witchcraft, Hebraism, gnosticism, hallucinogenic mushrooms and popular folklore. His paintings are replete with graphic ...”

“... the second part of a quasi-autobiographical trilogy, we are told that the book’s protagonist, John, ‘can see no reason why people need to dance’: Dancing makes sense only when it is interpreted as something else, something that people prefer not to admit. That something else is the real thing: the dance is merely a cover. Inviting a girl to dance ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... than a rabbit’. As for the plight of poor country farmers at this time of crisis over the Corn Laws, Carlyle experienced that in his own family. Many letters in these volumes were written to console his mother for the loss through reluctant emigration of his fanner brother Alexander, a victim partly of poor judgment but more of the difficulties experienced ...”

“... and preached rarely. Much of the work of conversion seems to have been done by a schoolmaster, John Leeche, who conducted house hold worship with larger audiences than the vicar. After courting martyrdom for six years, Leeche was just about to be condemned by the Assizes for teaching without licence when the Privy Council sent him a recusant boy caught on ...”

“... certainty about who really did what to whom than if Jeremy Thorpe, George Deakin, David Holmes and John Le Mesurier had been invited to take off their shoes and socks and walk along a trench full of glowing charcoal. As with the trench method, the populace gathered to watch or to read about how the defendants survived this ancient, agonising, irrational test ...”

“... picked up by law enforcement agencies around the world as the authorities struggled to modernise laws and investigative techniques designed to deal with old-fashioned varieties of organised crime. Glenny covered the Balkans during the collapse of the Soviet Union, and wrote three ambitious histories of the region. His fourth book, McMafia, examined how the ...”

“... Scott have done more for the preservation of proper Scotland than could ever be accomplished by laws, statesmen or associations,’ wrote Henry Cockburn. After Scott’s death, the most significant literary figure in Edinburgh was not a Scotsman, but the reclusive Thomas de Quincey. Mr Royle treats him to a passing tip of the hat while he evokes the great ...”

“... it was Chamberlain, breaking with old orthodoxies, who sought to achieve through tariff reform Sir John Seeley’s vision of a Greater Britain equipped for the struggles of the 20th century. Many efforts have been made to interpret Chamberlain and the great U-turn he performed in mid-career. Inevitably, the supporters of Mr Gladstone regarded him as a traitor ...”