“... happened was another. (It proved to be a lengthy and difficult business for the military historian John Kaye, who died in 1876 before completing his still standard History of the Sepoy War in India: in three volumes he had taken the narrative only to the end of 1857. More recently, Andrew Ward’s moving account of the mutiny at Kanpur weighs in at nearly 700 ...”

“... responsibility’ for what they had done. At Los Alamos, Feynman wrote, the great mathematician John von Neumann ‘gave me an interesting idea: that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. So I developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility … It’s made me a very happy man ever since.’ The great thing about ...”

“... close by the gallows, three miles travelling through long nights’. Like the kingdom of Prester John, the Wonders of the East, and the lands of Mandeville’s travels, Cockaigne exists as a proposed counterpart to the world of mundane reality. Compared with most medieval thinking about the ‘Golden Age’, which was safely confined to the past and provided ...”

“... with its local grass and trees, and its toys and slide. He has even less regard for the late John Aspinall’s approach at Howletts in Kent, where the gorillas romp through their entire lives in a series of gymnasia. But I reckon the gorillas divide the hundreds of species of tree in their native tropical forests fairly simply into those that can be ...”

“... dead germs into the Good Body!’). Pamela (‘most rural of them all’, as her would-be suitor John Betjeman had it, for which read ‘sweet and dull’) met Hitler, too. Asked about him later, she said: ‘Very ordinary, like an old farmer in a brown suit,’ but went into ecstasies over the delicious new potatoes that had been served at lunch. The shadow ...”

“... it ‘a terrible thing to be a woman’, on a visit to London in 1914 found herself in front of John Opie’s portrait of Wollstonecraft: ‘I wanted so desperately to know how other women had saved their souls alive. And the woman in the little frame arrested me, this woman with the auburn hair, and the sad, steady, light-brown eyes, and the gallant poise ...”

“... cannot be assimilated to that encoded on the processor of a computer, how are we to understand it? John Gurdon demonstrated in the 1970s that the nucleus of a fully differentiated adult frog cell can be ‘reprogrammed’ by transferring it into a fertilised egg from which the nucleus has been removed: embryonic development follows. The same experiment was ...”

“... Worship: the great Prayer Book Protest of 2000. Today, resistance is likely to come only from John Major’s little old ladies on bicycles, and from the Prayer Book Society – which may well have more members than those lobbies of fuel protesters. It was Cranmer’s intention that what was said in church should be ‘understanded of the people’. The ...”

“... pleasure in the greening of his bronzes by oxidation (especially near the sea). Talking to John Fowles in 1987, Andy Goldsworthy came out with this wonderfully relaxed notion: ‘Ten years ago I made a line of stones in Morecambe Bay. It is still there, buried under the sand, unseen. All my work still exists, in some form.’ That is of course true of ...”

“... frivolity and public school backbone, was educated at Haileybury and Cambridge. As the critic John Peter has put it, ‘parts of the Criterion resembled a supplement to the Tablet – while, incomprehensibly, other parts were crowded with Marxists and moderns.’ Read was an anarchist who accepted a knighthood, a champion of avant-garde art who also ...”

“... the lags over here have been told as autobiography: books like Jim Phelan’s Jail Journey (1940); John McVicar’s McVicar by Himself (1974); Jimmy Boyle’s Sense of Freedom (1977). When Boyle set down his experience in a novel, Hero of the Underworld (1999), the central character was already out of prison and back on the streets. According to the ...”

“... first husband, ‘knew every painting’ in Venice and they bought some old furniture together. John Holms, for whom she left Vail, seems to have been less well informed. ‘In Toledo,’ she tells us, ‘we spent the whole day searching for El Greco’s painting of that city, not knowing that it was in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.’ Alfred ...”

“... says, he learned painting from a certain ‘Jean-Babeuf Audubon’, presumably a near relative of John James Audubon. On returning to England, he ‘lived the life of a rat’ for twenty years; he was eventually arrested in Bristol, accused of forgery and transported to Van Diemen’s Land. After causing maximum offence with a series of satirical paintings ...”

“... what took place at Beijing airport on Monday, 21 February 1972. It’s also the opening scene of John Adams’s opera Nixon in China, premiered in Houston in 1987, and staged again at the London Coliseum over a few evenings last summer. An actual occurrence then, but also, as Adams and his librettist Alice Coleman understood, a brightly lit performance with ...”

“... in 1781, and that of the 5000 inhabitants exposed to infection, 99.5 per cent caught the disease. John Enders and his young associate T.C. Peebles were the first to grow measles virus in the test tube in 1954, using the tissue culture techniques developed by Enders and his colleagues in the late 1940s. Much good that did him at Harvard. Even though he was ...”