“... structure of haemoglobin won him the Nobel Prize for chemistry, which he shared with his colleague John Kendrew. There is a surprisingly frank description of Perutz’s secondary research interest in his official Nobel biography for that year: ‘Perutz has pursued one sideline concerned with glaciers, studying their crystal texture and mechanism of flow, but ...”

“... and Dutch. It is characteristic that what amounted to a ‘Constructivist international’, as John Willett described it, was set up by a collection of Hungarians, Dutch, Belgians, Romanians, Soviet Russians and Germans at a meeting in Weimar with prospective headquarters in Berlin. This was the culture that German émigrés imported into their countries ...”

“... Iraqis were killed in March. American politicians ran for cover. While I was in Baghdad in March, John McCain visited, at the same time as Dick Cheney. Both expressed confidence that security was improving. McCain told CNN that Muqtada’s ‘influence has been on the wane for a long time’. Two weeks later, he denied he had ever said such a thing; what he ...”

“... effects of different rates than on the exegesis of ancient texts. In a pamphlet from 1691, John Locke made an early, influential argument against efforts to hold down interest rates, claiming that this incentivised speculation, hurt prudent savers, and benefited only ‘bankers and scriveners’ who were ‘skilled in the arts of putting out ...”

“... even though he ‘read every pertinent document in every available archive’.But then, in 2011, John Tofik Karam, a young scholar working on the Arab diaspora in Brazil, published a piece in Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies. Karam had come across the Paraguay programme while researching Arab migrations to South America. He was relieved to hear ...”

“... nature like Emerson’s transparent eyeball – and various European poets. This passage recalls John Donne (‘like gold to airy thinness beat’) and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘instress’, the term he used to describe the act of witnessing and recognising the ‘inscape’ – or holy and unique quality – of all natural phenomena. The girl infuses ...”

“... congressional tally of results on 6 January 2021. Here the rainmaker in Trump’s entourage was John Eastman, as it happens a former student of Lessig’s at the University of Chicago, where he was in the same class as the anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney. Eastman’s feeble argument – that Vice President Mike Pence was empowered to overturn Democratic ...”

“... suit. In February 1994, Aliyev made an official visit to the UK. He met the prime minister, John Major, and the foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, signing a ‘declaration on friendship and co-operation’ between Britain and Azerbaijan. The UK made representations on Azerbaijan’s behalf at the UN, while British special forces and attachés provided ...”

“... The constituency included Hull University, which had an active New Left led by academics such as John Saville, a historian and founder with E.P. Thompson of the New Reasoner, a forerunner to New Left Review. Many trade unionists and working-class Labour supporters, who Gott hoped would be responsive to his criticisms of Wilson’s leadership, also lived in ...”

“... tableau of a secular scene, the bourgeois mode of ‘a window on the world’ (which John Berger once associated with a safe on the wall), or a modernist painting of pure abstraction (which, despite the frequent claims of autonomy made on its behalf, is usually a commodity on the wall too). Like many others, Nagel sees a gradual breakdown of this ...”

“... and physical ties on the other. Or the Clint Eastwood of The Outlaw Josey Wales versus the John Wayne of The Searchers. Jimmy Carter and Michael Foot versus Reagan and Thatcher, say. In the end: the difference between the idealistic left and the libertarian right. Somewhere between, possibly, lies freedom that manages to find a way of living with ...”

“... How might one recognise depression in a mouse? Who’s to say how an autistic rat will behave?John Bumpass Calhoun, the subject of these two books, was one of the most famous advocates of rodent experimentation in 20th-century psychology. In both Rat City and Lee Dugatkin’s Dr Calhoun’s Mousery he is treated as an eccentric visionary, whose insights ...”

“... republican utopias, you could catch James Harrington at Miles’s; if you wanted literary wit, John Dryden and his mates would be at Will’s; and in the 1710s you could join in polite conversation with Addison and Steele at Button’s. If you wanted to gamble, the Young Man’s was a good bet; if experimental natural philosophy was your thing, Royal ...”

“... had been the chairman of Eurotunnel, was appointed to run the Strategic Rail Authority, created by John Prescott in 1999 to give direction to the privatised industry. Morton commissioned a report from Atkins and Ernst & Young to assess whether there was a need for such a line. By the time they reported in 2003, Morton – who was too outspoken to occupy such a ...”

“... are beginning to swallow up all the agricultural land between the city centre and the villages John Clare knew. Peterborough has already accepted, at a price, the forcibly migrated rough sleepers of Cambridge. Its reward is public housing gifted by remote Kensington developers.When​ I reached the Thames, coming away from Abbey Wood station, I was ...”