“... found in the 13th and 14th centuries, in writers such as Vincent de Beauvais and, in particular, John Mandeville, who, in his (imaginary) Travels, projected his account of cuissage onto a distant world. According to Mandeville, the danger of deflowering a virgin was so keenly felt among certain primitive peoples that special young men – called ...”

“... Romania, for example. The problems were forcefully pointed out by the troops on the ground when John Major went to visit them in Kuwait after the war. He said that Options for Change would not be implemented until the lessons of the war had been analysed. However, Tom King, then the Secretary of State for Defence, had already promised to give the outline to ...”

“... a sinister beauty and the power to inspire wonder. Botting cannot resist borrowing for an epigraph John Masefield’s tribute to the great sailing ships: ‘They mark our passage as a race of men,/Earth will not see such ships as these again.’ This lively book is a zeppelin history which concentrates on the round-the-world voyage of the Graf Zeppelin in ...”

“... out of the author’s control the more adjectives and adverbs he throws after them. In past years John Updike and Isaac Bashevis Singer, among others, have made large claims on Schulz’s behalf. While his imaginative vigour is indeed comparable with that of his great European predecessors, his work lacks their ruthless logic, the stern, paternal ...”

“... camp personnel, Gestapo and police, or participants in the ‘euthanasia’ programme). No wonder John McCloy, the generally patient American High Commissioner, complained about the ‘abysmal ignorance’ displayed by many who wrote to him. Frei brings out very well the pathos that attached to incarcerated former members of the Wehrmacht, and the ...”

“... demographic, criminal, medical – gathered for large populations. Eighteenth-century writers like John Arbuthnot and Johann Süssmilch had chalked up the remarkable stability of the ratio of girl-to-boy babies born each year to divine providence, but to the judicial statisticians of the early 19th century it seemed less clear what interest God might have in ...”

“... the prose of the catalogue and the TV commentaries, where they are rather heavily underlined by John Tavener’s music for the title sequences. Still, the organisers encourage us to compromise, to substitute human for theological concepts, to accept the life and sufferings of Christ as ‘archetypes of all human experience’, conveying truths not just to ...”

“... and finally to expand that notion of interaction into the genres of autobiographies.’ In 1993, John Sturrock could say in The Language of Autobiography: ‘there has never yet been an autobiography addressed to a readership of literary theorists.’ Now it looks as if that time is upon us. The general reader, it seems, is left out of the loop, save as ...”

“... in horror from the emerging globe’. As he walks through the airport, he begins to imagine it as John F. Kennedy’s supine body, ‘with his legs and his arms outstretched, and leech-like aeroplanes sucking his toes and fingers’. It’s not a very good representation of the terror of arrival, but then Pronek is self-effacing and effaced, and this new ...”

“... of his ‘philosophical heroes’ as Dewey, James (W.; certainly not H.), Peirce, J.L. Austin, John McDowell, Husserl (with reservations) and, of course, Wittgenstein. Disappointingly, however, neither Putnam nor anybody else in his direct realist pantheon is prepared actually to offer an account of how perception works. Rather, ‘in my opinion, “direct ...”

“... good old Bob Boothby is in. Franz Rosenzweig is invisible, but there are four references to Lord John Russell. Forget Kafka, Freud, Durkheim, S.D. Luzzatto, Chagall, Sholom Aleichem and (aside from fleeting mentions) Mendele Moikher Seforim and J.L. Peretz. The last three were the most celebrated writers of the golden age of Yiddish literature: like all the ...”

“... Yeats was prematurely describing her as a woman stricken with age, she had a delirious affair with John Quinn, the American lawyer who was the great, almost indispensable, patron of the Yeats family. Foster, noting that her son, Robert, unlike Sir William, was short, allows himself (hiding the news in a note at the back of his huge book) to report local gossip ...”

“... the Lion Woman’, ‘Chang the Chinese Giant’, ‘Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy’ and John Merrick, the ‘Elephant Man’. But by the turn of the century, the mood of the public had changed and the public display of such ‘human prodigies’ – as they preferred to be called – had become unacceptable in many countries. The profession of ...”

“... The Inner Circle is written in the first person, unlike Boyle’s earlier book; its narrator is John Milk, a character based closely on Clyde Martin, Kinsey’s first employee at the nascent Institute for Sex Research. According to Paul Gebhard, quoted in Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s biography of Kinsey, Martin was also the last person Kinsey fell in love ...”

“... in Fallujah are becoming more confident. In one attack in February they almost killed General John Abizaid, the US Middle East commander, and in another they overran the police headquarters, killing some twenty men. The soldiers in the specialised units of the 82nd Airborne Division sound a little perplexed by the sort of war they are fighting. At a base ...”