“... of their fears and consolations. ‘Nude and Seascape’, though it may nod towards stories like John Fowles’s ‘The Collector’ in its macabre subject matter, raises important questions about the relation between life and art, movement and stasis. ‘A Double Room’ is another story that makes the reader experience discomfort, this time for the ...”

“... days, a clunky wooden casket into which revolving wax-covered cylinders were slotted) on which John Seward records his medical and psychiatric observations. Harker’s fiancée, Mina, uses another new invention, the typewriter (not yet thirty years old when Dracula was first published in 1897), to transcribe the recordings, journal entries and newspaper ...”

“... Stephen Lushington, the dashing cricketer-jurist who represented the black men Louis Lecesne and John Escoffery after their unlawful deportation from Jamaica, was identified as the son of an East India Company chairman. The planters of Mauritius, which Britain had seized from France in 1810, were also damned as agents of subversion.When Macaulay & Babington ...”

“... in light of Keenan’s refusal to name any of the Black walk-on characters in the novel. Only John Coltrane – whose work is likened to Russian literature in translation – passes the ‘cool’ test in the world where David Keenan is ...”

“... Westminster system. The academic jurist and political theorist Neil MacCormick – son of John MacCormick, the founding father of Scottish nationalist politics – began to explore the limits of sovereignty in an era of international organisations, intergovernmental blocs, regional subsidiarity and cross-border co-operation. With the arrival of ...”

“... of the intergovernmental talks was the frank relationship between the British prime minister, John Major, and his Irish counterpart, Albert Reynolds. ‘It went all right – I chewed his bollocks off and he took a few lumps outa me,’ Reynolds announced casually after he and Major had emerged from an hour-long one-on-one meeting. On 15 December 1993 the ...”

“... I recently discovered that Aigas House is now home to the nature writer and rewilding advocate Sir John Lister-Kaye, who has restored the building to its Scots baronial glory. Aigas is now a field centre, an ecotourism business and the site of two experimental programmes: a Beaver Demonstration Project and a captive Wildcat Conservation Breeding ...”

“... peach.Specktor appreciates Rosenfeld – he sees how well she did with the far-fetched parable of John Cheever’s short story ‘The Swimmer’, with Burt Lancaster as a burned-out Wasp crawling his way across the backyard swimming pools of rural Connecticut (the athletic Burt could not swim) – but he is entranced by the elusive Carole Eastman, who is ...”

“... Meanwhile, plenty of other countries might also have been classed as ‘pandemoniums’, to use John Milton’s newly minted word. France endured regicide and rebellion and the Holy Roman Empire lost perhaps five million lives to the Thirty Years’ War. Nothing in England was comparable to the sack of Magdeburg in 1631. Jackson anticipates and deflects ...”

“... of a scruple that finds its red line somewhere between marriage and the marriage bed. (Yes, John Ruskin, but this, we’re given to understand, was Vollman’s second wife.) What’s really odd is Vollman’s need to explain a 19th-century wedding in terms meant to flatter a 21st-century sensibility. When Vollman says: ‘I know what you are ...”

“... Daniel Bernoulli, expected utility theory was formalised in the 1940s by the mathematician John von Neumann and the economist Oskar Morgenstern in their work on game theory. They devised a set of axioms for decision-making that transformed economics, psychology, political theory and US nuclear strategy.If a person with £10 loses £5, and a person with ...”

“... Back-Bone of an Eel’. And then the rabbits began to appear.A local apothecary and obstetrician, John Howard, was the first person outside her immediate circle to examine Toft. He said he felt something ‘leaping’ in her womb. Under his supervision in Guildford, she went on to deliver a large number of dead rabbits, nine in a single day. Howard wrote ...”

“... would be prime minister and football would reclaim its place at the centre of national life. Then John Major won, and two months later England were dumped out of Euro ’92 by Sweden. The Sun put the England manager, Graham Taylor, on the back page with a turnip for a head. In 1994 England failed to qualify for the World Cup. The most important managers in ...”

“... lawyers like Victor Yannacone, who brought the first lawsuit against the makers of DDT, and John Banzhaf, who acquired the first copyright for computer code, helped develop a consumer protection movement driven by environmentalism and concerns about product safety. Their strategy was encapsulated in what Milov calls a ‘pugnacious and pithy ...”

“... about Richard II, was a huge West End hit in the early 1930s; it made the name of the young John Gielgud, who also directed; Ffrangcon-Davies was Queen Anne. Tey never managed to follow up its crazy success; Ffrangcon-Davies commissioned a play about Mary Queen of Scots, but it didn’t work because Tey didn’t like Mary – too emotional, too ...”