“... turned up in 1974, and kept Christopher both amused and busy translating his poetry into English. John Silber, who later became a reactionary megalomaniac (first as president of Boston University and then as failed gubernatorial candidate), was at that point a brilliant and progressive dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, also brought in by Ransom. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... looking for a particular primitive thrill in their black music: what the field recordist John Lomax, who toured the prisons and work camps of the South in the 1930s, called ‘uncontaminated’ black singing, not spoiled by the record companies and the cities. In Hamilton’s account, the collectors were often explicitly racist – looking for music ...”

“... had one child, a daughter. So he’s a curious – you could almost say implausible – mix of John McCain and Bill Clinton, though a few decades younger than either of them. According to the conventions of stories about fictional presidents, the novel strives to maintain the appearance of bipartisanship; Duncan never tells us which party he belongs ...”

“... architecture. It was completed after his death (in 1852) by another architectural historian, John Henry Parker, who also drew on it for Our English Home: Its Early History and Progress (1860). Despite this encouraging start, the emergence in the later 19th and early 20th centuries of modern history as a university subject did nothing to advance the study ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... presence in the country involves piping up every ten minutes with ‘Danny Boy’. In his play John Bull’s Other Island (1904), which the prime minister of the day, Herbert Asquith, saw five times, Shaw presents a dismally accurate vision of the Free State that would emerge almost twenty years later: the contempt of the new farming class for landless ...”

“... and couldn’t tell anyone about it, until she eventually met a woman called Robin who worked for John Lewis and they moved in together. She had fallen in love for the first time aged six – with a fair-haired girl called Melvina – but it was only when she arrived in London to find work as a secretary that she was able to acknowledge, in limited ...”

“... world, peering timidly into the window of Peppe Ramundo Menswear and Black Tie. The statue of St John on the stone bridge was the one that all the tourists touched; there was a superstition that it meant you would return to Prague someday. The part of the statue that was touched had become brighter, not like the dull dark rest of the bridge; it was the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... greed. Even some of the 19th century’s best-known bibliophiles, among them Henry Bradshaw and John Ruskin, were not above dismembering books to see how they were made or to snip out attractive miniatures. Collages and ‘leaf books’ (composites made of folios sliced from disparate manuscripts) enjoyed a late Victorian vogue. Today, priceless books of ...”

“... or literature in society’. And a decade ago, when controversy over the curriculum was at a peak, John Guillory added that debates about literary and artistic canons merely disguised the simple fact that they weren’t very important to anyone’s self-fashioning. By the late 1990s the humanities appeared marginal even to the universities, driven as they were ...”

“... precedence. ‘His Lordship affected more aristocracy than befitted his years or the occasion,’ John Galt thought, and Hazlitt agreed: ‘He may affect the principles of equality, but he resumes his privilege of peerage, upon occasion.’ Gilmour is nearer the mark to see in Byron’s touchiness and bumptiousness not the toff reverting to type, but rather a ...”

“... your Winnie. Winifred also graced state functions – among them, a dinner for Anthony Eden and John Simon in 1935. Hitler noticed that she had eaten nothing and ordered a carafe of wine and a tray of delicacies for her when the guests had gone. She treasured this as a token of his ‘sensitivity’. Hamann attributes the subsequent cooling in their ...”

“... processes compel it to change its stance (as in the case of the legislative amendment proposed by John McCain and adopted by the US Senate, which caused the Bush administration to change its actions and commit more clearly to international obligations placing limits on the interrogation of detainees). Goldsmith and Posner do not discuss any of this. Their ...”