“... composition by the Florentine painter Andrea del Sarto, showing the Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist. The original has been in Rome since about 1790, possibly much earlier, and many copies are recorded. The image beneath the portrait is somewhat smaller than the one in Rome. It is known that in 1517 Sarto painted a picture of an unspecified ...”

“... Truman as president and inherited the Mossadegh problem. The new administration – which included John Foster Dulles as secretary of state and his brother Allen, now director of the CIA – largely endorsed the views of the outgoing team. In a memo written at the beginning of March assessing the situation in Iran, Allen Dulles advised Eisenhower that ‘a ...”

“... few cases more sober sources corroborate Procopius’ account: even Theodora’s fellow Miaphysite John of Ephesus said that she came ‘from the brothel’ (porneion), and Potter’s argument that the word could have referred simply to her past as an actress is too generous. There are other things Procopius could not possibly have known, and some he simply ...”

“... know, you are the bigger fool.’ ‘No future, no future, no future for you’ the Sex Pistols’ John Lydon sang in 1977’s ‘God Save the Queen’ (subsequently featured at the opening ceremony for the London Olympics in 2012). It’s no surprise he’s come out as a Brexitist. A core sentiment of Brexitism has been expressed to me as the worry that ...”

“... everything they had into pressurised wells and pumps. In the thick of this entrepreneurial swamp, John D. Rockefeller recognised that in a free market, voluntary co-operation would always give way to ruinous competition. Assiduously, Rockefeller and his Standard Oil trust integrated the chaotic functions of the oil business, and struck deals with the railroad ...”

“... as a border poll, as permitted under the Good Friday Agreement, is being discussed.The artist John Byrne used to sell replicas of the British army watchtowers that bristled up from the hill tops of Armagh. The fortifications have long gone, and there’s a world of difference between the frightening place Colm Tóibín explored in 1987 in Bad Blood: A ...”

“... which appeared in early 1959 only two months after the Hanover show, the artist and critic John McHale alludes to Rudolf Arnheim, who first applied Gestalt theory to art, and cites Paul Schilder on the ‘fragmentary associations’ that we fold into our body images. Similar reflections on the infantile development of the corporeal imago had been made ...”

“... Gunn had ‘3/4 decided to give up universities after my year at Berkeley’, as he wrote to John Lehmann, ‘and go to New York … Christ knows what I will do, but I’ll find something. I’m no longer interested in educating people – if I ever was.’ Gunn in fact taught at Berkeley until 1966, when he gave up tenure, and then returned in 1973 as a ...”

“... with anarchism? The Dadaists would be a good guess, but the truly political ones, such as John Heartfield and George Grosz, were communists, and since the early days of Proudhon and Marx anarchists and communists have been more rivals than comrades. The ultra-composed Neo-Impressionists aren’t obvious angels of chaos, yet Georges Seurat, Camille ...”

“... When he arrived​ at the meditation retreat, a little south of Paris, Emmanuel Carrère was warned that he would be working with powerful psychic energies. ‘If for some reason you decide to leave mid-session,’ he and the fifty other men present were told, ‘you’ll throw the others off, and above all you’ll put yourself in danger.’ A noble silence descended ...”

“... matriarch of the Norfolk family famous for its collection of letters, reminded her husband, John, in 1451 that ‘paper is deynty,’ precious and not to be wasted. Da Rold makes a convincing case for its distinctive material qualities, and its prestige as an imported, even exotic commodity in England. There were expensive varieties, not just painted ...”

“... son.If I am driving that way, I see, just before the turn for Sandymount, the house of Count John McCormack, the great tenor who, in May 1904, encouraged Joyce to enter the competition in which he had won a gold medal the year before. Joyce flunked the sight-reading and came third. McCormack would go on to have thirteen Rolls-Royces and many houses. His ...”

“... child labour would be both unfamiliar and inhumane, even though the father of liberalism, John Locke, thought it acceptable for three-year-olds to work in factories. Anyway, the preconceptions that matter most may be those we can’t know about, given that they are part of the social air we breathe. Slavoj Žižek has pointed out that Donald ...”

“... to read the reviews aloud. ‘It is to be hoped that she will be recognised for what she is,’ John Ashbery wrote in the New York Times, ‘one of the finest modern writers of fiction, in any language.’ He went on to describe her prose as ‘a constant miracle’ in which ‘it is impossible to deduce the end of a sentence from its beginning, or a ...”

“... in The Memory of War and in the sometimes, I thought, jejune poems of his collaboration with John Fuller, Partingtime Hall. The novelty in Manila Envelope is that nonsense and ‘light verse’ are yoked to the most harrowing material, and more rigorously than in Auden’s ‘Miss Gee’, for instance, which might otherwise seem a model, because the ...”