“... Petersburg. Among parvenus from other parts of Europe, few did better, at least for a time, than John Law, son of an Edinburgh banker, who gained an early reputation as a reckless gambler, but also as a brilliant thinker on economic matters. A companion from the gaming tables, the French regent Philippe d’Orléans, brought him to Paris in 1715 to reform ...”

“... get what you pay for. Each concept has acquired constitutional legitimacy in its time – for, as John Griffith famously observed, the constitution is what happens. So when you pick up The New British Constitution and ask what new constitution that might be, one answer is that the British constitution, because it is always changing, is always new. But the ...”

“... description of former slaves ‘unexpectedly standing’ at the helm of a ship after an uprising; John Berry’s strange and lurid film Tamango, starring Dorothy Dandridge; and the Senegalese novelist Boris Boubacar Diop’s playful metafiction Le Temps de Tamango. Mérimée ‘does not simply ignore abolitionism; he actively negates it’, Miller ...”

“... is a reference to Thackeray poking fun at the preciousness of Bulwer-Lytton: ‘By the bye, Sir John what wemarkable good clawet this is; is it Lawose or Laff – ? . . . this clawet is weally nectaweous.’ And of Greek wines – which Saintsbury found ‘as a rule, insufferably beastly’ – you might want to retrieve the Latin description of the ...”

“... with them. Some of his stances reflect our parlous era, but others have clear parallels in John Donne, who also imagined how the world would end, as well as in Virgilian homoerotic pastoral, also written in rough times. Chronic, after all, means ‘persistent over time’, and if human self-endangerment has persisted (enough that it now threatens much ...”

“... in this drama: the Imagists – H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington, T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, John Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowell – as well as scores more who had a stake in the continuing vitality of literature, including Yeats, Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The writers, clustered in clubs or ‘gangs’, wanted to ...”

“... family home. Inglis, in fact, hazards a guess that R.G. was the inspiration for the elder brother, John Walker, in Ransome’s We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea. True or not, it reminds us that when Collingwood set out, single-handed, on his ill-fated voyage into the English Channel in 1938, he had a lifetime of risky sailing experiences behind him. Inglis is ...”

“... about too much. Every document of barbarism is at the same time a record of civilisation. John Ashbery might write like this if he were a character in Gossip Girl. The best of Seidel’s new poems are weirder and stronger than ever. Only Stevens and Ashbery, among American poets, have settled into old age with comparably candy-coloured gifts ...”

“... thoughtfulness that he later accused her of lacking was especially hurtful. He wrote to his friend John Forster that she ‘wants to know whether you have “any books to send her”. If you have any literary rubbish on hand, please to shoot it here.’ She responded to every slight with unshakeable loyalty, even after Dickens had turned her out of the family ...”

“... Ellroy restages this perverse choreography: ‘I ignored the seat belt sign and jammed to the john. I spent 20 minutes looking for rips and tears in my eyes. The stewardess knocked. I told her I was all right. My bladder swelled. I took a long piss and became convinced I had diabetes. I rolled up my sleeves and examined a spot for metastasisation. My ...”

“... British and American ones) have praised the novel for its dissection of contemporary, post-John Howard Australia, and it’s true that Tsiolkas assembles a diverse cast. What he doesn’t do is make their ethnicity, faith or class count for much, or venture very far into these different worlds: Hector’s friend Bilal is an Aboriginal Muslim, with a ...”

“... The only public figure to denounce capitalism in the past 25 years, Hobsbawm claims, was Pope John Paul II. All the same, another couple of decades later, the fainthearted witnessed a system so exultant and impregnable that it only just managed to keep the cash machines open on the high streets. Eric Hobsbawm, who was born in the year of the Bolshevik ...”

“... the prevailing condition of interdependence across the modern world. Neil MacCormick’s father, John, was the principal begetter of the SNP, from which he became estranged during the Second World War. At the queen’s accession MacCormick senior, still a leading nationalist but operating outside the ranks of the SNP, instigated the legal proceedings ...”

“... animals with a long reproductive cycle are vulnerable to even the slightest of disruptions. John Alroy, an American palaeobiologist, has run computer simulations that suggest it would take just a tiny bit of interference with the Neanderthal birth rate, over the course of a few thousand years, to drive it to extinction. Alroy called this a ...”

“... and largely persisted until very recently, when geological exploration by Jelle de Boer and John Hale revealed two major faultlines under the shrine, together with the presence of ethylene gas. Not only was the bituminous limestone sufficiently fissured to allow the gas to rise to the surface through the Kassotis spring water (which the Pythia ...”