“... at home from Latin, the language of the learned fathers. In the 14th century, the translator John Trevisa wrote that nurses ‘whilispith and semisouneth the wordis’ (‘mispronounce and semi-sound the words’) to the child. Mother Tongue is alert to the relationship between words and mothering. In Making Babies, Anne Enright writes that ‘all words ...”

“... world. ‘The dream of purity and freshness was born from the omnipresence of muck and dust,’ John Berger wrote in his essay ‘A Load of Shit’. ‘This polarity must be one of the deepest rooted in human imagination, intimately connected with the idea of home as a shelter – against many things, including dirt.’ For Walt Whitman, ‘this ...”

“... a preferred policy tool has long been recognised, and even celebrated in fiction, for example in John Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl (1983), which featured an Israeli spymaster’s devious and successful plot to kill a Palestinian terrorist. One operation in particular caught the popular imagination: the hunting down of the perpetrators of the ...”

“... extraordinary ceiling mural depicting cavorting monkeys in 18th-century dress, executed c.1914 by John Alden Twachtman, who took inspiration from similar murals painted c.1730 by Christophe Huet at the Château de Chantilly, can now be admired. Elsewhere, architectural features – ranging from decorative marble and plasterwork to wood panelling and carvings ...”

“... and reviews: 160 pages followed by a cod-serious bibliography put together by his publisher, John Lane. The opposite approach, resulting in much the same title, was proposed by the very-much-not-dandiacal Gustave Flaubert, then 24, in a letter of 1846 to his friend Maxime Du Camp: ‘Very often, I doubt that I shall ever publish a single line. Wouldn’t ...”

“... Musyoka is unlikely to pose a serious threat. A few days after Odinga’s death, the journalist John Kamau published a tribute in the Daily Nation. ‘The House of Jaramogi has always lived in that uneasy space between power and its edges,’ he wrote. ‘They’ve shaped power from the outside, cut deals to sit inside, and left their fingerprints on every ...”

“... book, Crush, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 2004, joining first collections by Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery and Robert Hass in a century-old series that still guarantees critical attention. But Crush was unusual in achieving not just critical acclaim but substantial popular success. Its hot-blooded, hallucinatory poems, set in a run-down, roadside-horror ...”

“... others. The assumption that ‘we only directly observe sense data’ was vigorously attacked by John Austin, and before him (and in different ways) by William James and by Husserl. The very question, ‘How does thought hook on to the world?’ was undermined by Wittgenstein. Yet, by and large, these attacks on the epistemological model – and without ...”

“... to provide whisky and cigars for his European guests (as well as slave-girls for those, like St John Philby, sensible enough to embrace Islam). He only banned alcohol for foreigners in 1952, after a British consul had been murdered by an inebriated Saudi prince. Nowadays the fleshpots of Europe provide a safety-valve for those rich enough to afford them. If ...”

“... ground lies two generations before the waverings of first Mansfield and then Stowell, when Sir John Holt said all that the law could say about personal freedom, qualified in its territorial reach but handsomely unqualified by race or religion, until such time as Parliament was prepared to follow suit in the colonies. The courts cannot claim a consistent ...”

“... in which Powell pays tribute to the ‘insight’ and ‘courage’ of his fellow Black Country MP John Stonehouse, soon to become postmaster general and then regarded as a coming man in the Labour Party, perhaps even a future leader. Stonehouse had denounced as ‘a canker’ the campaign by local Sikh bus conductors to be allowed to wear their turbans at ...”

“... function differently during periods of rapid growth and periods of retrenchment. Anxious Wealth, John Osburg’s ethnography of ‘business entertaining’ in Chengdu, complements Buck’s book by showing how the social connections Buck says are so important come about and are maintained, and how they aid or hinder market transactions. His informants are ...”

“... influenced by Christian pietism, idealist philosophy, particularly that of Schelling, the work of John Brown, the former pupil of Cullen who attempted to relate all diseases to states of over or under-excitation of the nervous system, and the example of English mad-doctors, for whose empirical method Heinroth had considerable respect: William Perfect ...”

“... the architectural history of various subway systems and the theory of names as it developed from John Stuart Mill to Saul Kripke, with, by way of comparison, a solid account of necronym taboos among various tribes. Films, photographs and museum exhibits are everywhere used in evidence, as is an enormous range of recondite archival material. As the founder ...”

“... in Syria. Last April, after an optimistic assessment of rebel progress by the secretary of state, John Kerry, in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Dempsey told the Senate Armed Services Committee that ‘there’s a risk that this conflict has become stalemated.’ Dempsey’s initial view after 21 August was that a US strike on Syria – under ...”