“... gather a false conclusion from these true premises.’ In a work of 1744, The Female Monarchy, John Thorley was as repelled by the idea of the queen bee being an exemplar to women as Warder had been delighted to compare the queen bee to Queen Anne. He abominated the notion then gaining ground that the drones might have sex with the queen. She was ...”

“... the Andy Warhol Museum on Sandusky Street, where Andrew Warhola was born in 1928. As the director John Waters has said, every kid needs someone really bad to look up to, and the Warhol legacy carries on that counter-cultural role for a new generation. The museum recently organised an exhibition of the prison photographs from Abu Ghraib. In rural West ...”

“... were awkwardly placed in mid-Victorian Kensington. Their friends included the ageing Radical John Bright and Elizabeth Gaskell’s widower, William. But smart society was closed to them and this was something that Beatrix’s mother, Helen, seems to have minded deeply. A grim-faced little woman, she apparently occupied herself entirely with a round of ...”

“... narratives and the Book of Acts took shape and found readers. By the end of the reign of Domitian, John had composed the Book of Revelation and targeted the Whore of Babylon. The Flavian house of Vespasian made serious efforts to counteract the disastrous impact of Titus’ victory on relations with Jews, not least by setting up Josephus safely in Rome as he ...”

“... been dealt with explicitly by other writers: Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Grace Nichols and Tom Leonard, to name a few. For some, ‘literary art’ is a territory to be attained (Harrison’s ‘we’ll occupy/ your lousy leasehold, poetry’), in others a rule-book to be torn up (Agard’s ‘mugging de Queen’s ...”

“... what you can, control what you can’t,’ has proved congenial for different reasons to John Major and Tony Blair, and to Blair’s heir apparent, Gordon Brown. These men are to Jenkins Thatcher’s political ‘sons’, with David Cameron trotting along behind as a ‘grandson’. (The book was completed before Cameron’s Conservatives abandoned ...”

“... search of the Grail, a high-class Don Giovanni, the bizarre trio of Epicurus, Rabelais and Saint John the Baptist, as well as Chesterton, Mao Zedong, Maurice Barrès and Victor Hugo. In this orgy of comparisons and endorsements, the Dibamba/Yonda contest is an insignificant and almost ludicrous footnote. I wrote to reassure him: Please do not worry about ...”

“... The generation battle, in its particular post-Third-Reich incarnation, runs through Bernhard Schlink’s work, both his bestselling The Reader and Flights of Love, a collection of short stories loosely arranged around various break-ups and infidelities. Reviewers tend to discuss the books together, partly because Flights of Love develops plots, characters and arguments already present in The Reader, but mostly because The Reader is better, more interesting even in its failures than this sequel ...”

“... with rather juvenile insults to religion – the Virgin was a whore, Christ was a bastard and St John was his bedfellow, and so on. It seems that one somehow needed to publicise the outrageousness of one’s heretical opinions by talking in this manner. And indeed the most curious aspect of blasphemy and profanity in general is this apparent need. What use ...”

“... or Kafka – the most ‘impressive’ names on his bookshelf are Isaac Asimov, Ursula Le Guin and John Wyndham – but at a village meeting to discuss what to do about a proposed Gypsy campsite, he reflects that ‘the villagers wanted the Gypsies to be gross, so the grossness of what they’re not acts as a stencil for what the villagers are.’ He has ...”

“... be reached with the progressive end of the mainstream. Jones favoured reconciliation with the John Bright wing of Liberalism, and in January 1869 won a US-style primary for the Manchester seat over Thomas Milner Gibson, a former MP, by 7282 votes to 4133. It was a promising seat, he was 49 years old and the vanguard of the Lib-Labism or Lib-Radism by ...”

“... published in 1867. The ungovernable girl Tempe is involved in a railway accident with her husband, John Darke. Darke’s father brings the news to Tempe’s mother, Roxalana, and her dour friend Argus. But there has been a mistake: it turns out to be Darke who has been killed, not Tempe: A bright smile burst over Roxalana’s face, and even the iron ...”

“... This sort of deconstructive approach got under way in the second half of the 20th century, when John Wansbrough, the author of Quranic Studies (1977) and The Sectarian Milieu (1978), was a pioneering figure in the attempt to revise the received story. Apologetic and more literalist readings competed for the support of Muslims. Reconciling the surface ...”

“... appalling kitsch, while members of the Popular Front, including the former Disney animator John Hubley, a leader in the studio’s bitter 1941 strike, considered the movie an example of dangerous formalism, advocating Chaplin as a corrective.) Disney’s contribution to the US war effort – including the fascinating and appalling animated polemic for ...”

“... are usually given as George and Lady Mary Hamilton. The daughter appears to have been Sophia St John Hamilton. Just then Foscolo was brushing up his English by reading Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, which he later translated into Italian. The Hamiltons’ dashing and accommodating captor, according to one account published under the pseudonym Captain ...”