“... Henry Bolckow, a Mecklenburg-born corn tycoon and his English iron-maker business partner, John Vaughan, who opened ironworks on the Tees in 1841. But the firm of Bolckow and Vaughan didn’t come into its own until 1850, when Bolckow rather opportunely found iron ore in the nearby Eston Hills while out hunting. The proximity of coal, transport and an ...”

“... Teeth exposed what Luttwak rightly calls the ‘tenth-century military renaissance’, and John Haldon, who has written extensively on Byzantine armies. Although Luttwak’s style reflects his journalism, his analyses are solidly rooted in recent Byzantine studies, which, as he observes in his preface, ‘have flourished as never before’. He ...”

“... as a phenomenon in itself but as an aspect of their relationships with each other, or his own with John Gower, who wrote in all three of England’s languages. Chaucer’s historical context, especially Richard II’s fraught relationships with the city of London, has been much explored in recent years; Butterfield promotes instead the more general context of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... philosophers to be able to say something intelligible about it’, is itself not unmetaphorical. John Locke associated it with a rhetorical idea of the plain style, which metaphorically was akin to the kinds of clothes you wear on weekdays rather than on high days or holidays: ‘Philosophy itself,’ he declared, ‘must have so much Complacency, as to be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the endpapers of the book, Hall, I suspect taking yet another cue from cinema – this time from John Frankenheimer’s 1966 film Seconds, in which Rock Hudson’s Arthur Hamilton, having first ‘died’ then returned to watch his old life from the outside, sees an idyllic beach scene at the very moment of his second, and real, death – reprints a picture ...”

“... reasonable expectations, and colluded in outlawing demons on both sides. By 1987 comforters like John Lewis Gaddis could write that the Cold War and the Iron Curtain had been a ‘way of life’ for more than two generations, with the result that ‘it simply does not occur to us to think about how it might end or, more to the point, how we would like it to ...”

“... In the spring of 1974, as reports multiplied of his involvement with crooks such as John Poulson and T. Dan Smith, Reginald Maudling disappeared to Paris with his wife, Beryl. The Daily Mail’s Harry Longmuir had little difficulty locating him in the ‘Président’ suite of the George V. Checking in himself, Longmuir spent a whole Sunday morning with a confused, disorientated Maudling in his dressing-gown ...”

“... by 1943. If his books now end up in charity shops alongside discarded copies of the F-Plan Diet or John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, it’s because the shimmering and peaceable ‘England’ he promised is not, after all, to be found waiting at the end of a deserted lane, or, if it were, we’d never know, because we’d be stuck in a traffic ...”

“... one or two slip-ups en route. Bacon is made to sound too much like Descartes; the philosopher John Toland was not British; and Raymond Williams was not a Marxist. Neither was Althusser the cold-blooded adversary of experience painted here. It is true that he saw experience as the homeland of ideology; but ideology is by no means simply a pejorative term ...”