“... is to purge itself ruthlessly of dud leadership. It’s true that had it been Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell who spooked the markets, Labour would have stuck with them out of a determination not to be pushed around by anyone. The Tories bailed out at the first sign of trouble. Perhaps this is the way parliamentary democracy is meant to work. The contrast ...”

“... the biographies, the inexplicable determination of Kenneth Branagh (of Shackleton) to out-act John Mills (of Scott of the Antarctic), the retellings of modern legends about the explorers freezing and dying and writing poetry as they did so. But Tromsø is almost empty. There seem to be hardly any tourists, though I am told by a smiling woman in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and butterflies to realise Titania’s fairy attendants accurately and Victorian artists such as John Anster Fitzgerald also borrowed features from the insect world to make their fairylands convincing. Today, through the ingenuities of CGI, many of these hybrids now speak and weep, appearing convincingly embodied and entirely sentient. Entertainments, from ...”

“... Byron’s text to take advantage of the latest theatrical machinery and special effects:The actor John Cartlich was tied to the back of the ‘wild horse’ and exited the stage to be replaced by another horse with a dummy … This horse and dummy then careered up the helter-skelter mountain course, crisscrossing the stage left to right and back again, all ...”

“... through Romantic writers, and that of the Gawain poet. On a walking tour in June 1818, in Cumbria, John Keats wrote to his brother, ‘I shall henceforth write more than ever, for the abstract endeavour of being able to add a mite to that mass of beauty which is harvested from these grand materials.’ When Gawain sets off into the wilderness, he is not moved ...”

“... life. The sharp decline of hitchhiking in the 1990s may have been informed by the geographer John Adams’s concept of the ‘risk thermostat’, one implication of which is that people’s perception of danger often differs wildly from statistical reality. The horror stories, in other words, were taking the place of less obvious underlying ...”

“... the 1970 ‘School Kids Issue’ of Oz. The classic defence tactic was used of having counsel – John Mortimer QC – representing two of the editors and arguing issues of law, while the other, Richard Neville, represented himself and said things that lawyers were not permitted to say (though Mortimer was at his fluent best when not talking about the ...”

“... then further fictionalising their situation in The New Machiavelli. The editor of the Spectator, John St Loe Strachey, a pillar of the National Social Purity Crusade (no, really), foamed at the novel’s ‘poisonous and pernicious teaching’, finding it ‘in its essence depraved’ (the book, it should be said, contains no description of sexual activity ...”

“... however, he was painting. His first inspiration came, apparently, through exposure to the works of John Constable in 1839; within a few years he was painting the small studies of everyday urban sites that include some of his best known work but which began to emerge from his studio only around the turn of the century, just before his death in 1905. Rear ...”

“... and Eurocentric perspective’ date from the first half of the last century. Set against, say, John Elliott’s concept of a ‘multiple monarchy’ (Elliott is absent even from Kamen’s bibliography which, given his enormous influence, is difficult to account for) or Serge Gruzinski’s writings on mestisaje (also absent) which depict the Empire as not ...”

“... appear to be beneath or beyond direct criticism, although a hilarious account of Michel reading John Grisham’s The Firm, during which, unexpectedly aroused by its contents, he ejaculates between the pages, could be construed by patriots as a savage attack on everything that is fine and decent about the US. The British are represented by Frederick ...”

“... longest-running experiment in the history of science. The Park Grass Experiment, set up in 1856 by John Bennet Lawes at Rothamsted in Hertfordshire, has now been running more than five times longer than its nearest rival, and still yields results of use to plant ecologists. The original object was to assess the effects of different fertilisation regimes on a ...”

“... the Enlightenment and the redneck fringe are more closely aligned than we imagine. After all, even John Locke, the acknowledged grandfather of Anglo-American liberalism, excluded two obnoxious groups from his broad scheme of religious toleration: Roman Catholics, whose allegiance was suspect, and atheists, who could not be trusted to observe oaths and ...”