“... about the screen-mediation of reality. In his philosophic commonplace book Straw Dogs (2002), John Gray propounded a new theory of consciousness: ‘In evolutionary prehistory consciousness emerged as a side-effect of language. Today it is a by-product of the media.’ Cronenberg is one of a burgeoning group of artists who are attempting to describe what ...”

“... is not a later historian’s conceit. It appears to have been coined by the Whig MP John Hampden, grandson of the hero of resistance to Charles I’s ship money, in testimony to a committee of the House of Lords in the autumn of 1689. Hampden was exulting that, in contrast to the Cromwellian revolution of the 1640s and 1650s which his ancestor ...”

“... vicious ambiguity: what was done to her? Or, what has she done to herself? After Colin Dexter and John Thaw’s Inspector Morse, Ian Rankin’s Rebus and Helen Mirren’s Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect, Rachel raises the tradition of the alcoholic detective to a new level. The novel’s main protagonist spends most of her time on train journeys, with no ...”

“... is bad enough. But according to one of the world’s most influential climate scientists, John Schellnhuber, ‘the difference between two and four degrees is human civilisation.’ Thanks to the global paralysis since 1992, the ‘window of opportunity’ for reducing emissions fast enough to avoid this scenario is starting to look more like a crack ...”

“... opportunist whose idea of the long term is tomorrow’s Daily Mail headline, and who, unlike John Major in similar circumstances, is seemingly prepared to do almost anything to retain his leadership. In his attempts to contain Ukip he has already given a number of hostages to fortune. He has promised a referendum on EU membership – on Ukip’s ...”

“... in the world. In 1999, the year she first visited the war-ravaged country, the tropical ecologist John Terborgh declared that ‘nature’ in El Salvador had ‘been extinguished’. Hecht therefore expected a ‘blasted landscape’ but what she found was green everywhere, ribbons of urban hedgerows, slum ravines planted with trees, backyard ...”

“... taste for military bands and films about army life, like Tunes of Glory, with Alec Guinness and John Mills. An intense dislike of denim, which I associate with fatigues and servility, has deterred me from ever wearing jeans. I love to hear a Jamaican accent and, despite its violence and gang warfare, I still think of the island’s extraordinary ...”

“... many are more disturbed by the fate of journalists and aid workers beheaded in Syria by Jihadi John. The role Islam plays in forming the identity of violent jihadis is controversial. Some critics of Islam quote particular Quranic texts to suggest that violence is an essential part of the faith. They point out that as the Kouachi brothers fled the Charlie ...”

“... Germany and at first didn’t hesitate to express his impatience with the scare: when asked by Sir John Barlow, MP for Frome, whether he was aware that there were 66,000 German soldiers in England and 50,000 stands of Mauser rifles stored in cellars within a few hundred yards of Charing Cross, he thanked Barlow for providing such an excellent example of the ...”

“... weak police force, still had far more coercive power at its disposal than the England of John Lackland, and by the autumn of 1754 Mandrin’s exploits were making the government distinctly nervous. His gang looked less like a collection of brigands, and more like a small guerrilla army. Fears arose that in the event of a new foreign war against ...”

“... physicians and their apothecaries was often close, and could be corrupt: Chaucer’s contemporary John Gower wrote of how the crooked double act of apothecary and physician could devise rip-offs a hundred times more dastardly than either could manage alone. The modern version of such practices is rampant in today’s private healthcare market; I have known ...”

“... before with The Porcupine, based on the trial of the Bulgarian communist leader Todor Zhivkov. John Banville did it in a roman à clef about Anthony Blunt in The Untouchable; and the Russian writer Olga Trifonova presented her persuasive and well-researched portrayal of Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, in the form of a novel. All these bio-fictions ...”

“... easily parodied. It was Olivia Manning’s inspiration to call them the Snows of yesteryear, and John Bird and Eleanor Bron sent them up on The Late Show (Johnson sued). These lives are interesting now because they’re history; but I suspect there’s nothing to recover from the novels. All writers are susceptible, it goes without saying, to vanity and ...”

“... soul? A few white scholars thought the task impossible. Indeed, one of the most famous – John Burgess, founder of Columbia’s School of Political Science and of the Political Science Quarterly – opposed President McKinley’s imperial adventuring precisely because it threatened the democratic institutions he thought suited to ...”

“... inside and outside the Middle East and Africa as a reason for state weakness. ‘Corruption,’ John Kerry said in May, ‘is as much of an enemy, because it destroys nation-states, as some of the extremists we are fighting.’ This is certainly true in Iraq, where military officers traditionally buy their jobs with the help of a large loan, which they pay ...”