“... to bolster the movie’s plot – the future Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, Archbishop John Hughes and the showman P.T. Barnum – are either transported backwards in time or engage in alliances with gangs that defy the actual marginality of these gangs within the class and power structure of the mid-century city. As for Gangs of New York’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but of African Americans as well. Making Americans takes issue on several crucial points with John Higham’s classic Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (1955). Higham drew a sharp distinction between racism and nativism, which King’s account tends to blur. ‘Racism and nativism were different things,’ Higham has recently ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Azores only confirmed this picture of the inhabited world surrounded by a dusting of islands; when John Cabot landed on the Labrador coast in 1497 and Pedro Alvares Cabral made it to Brazil in 1500, they also declared their discoveries to be islands. The kind of map best suited to sailing around the oecumene was the portolano, which began as a listing of ...”

“... Nancy met and married Waldorf Astor, who owned the Observer and was MP for Plymouth; his brother John owned the Times. The Astors were so rich that occasionally it embarrassed her: ‘My dear what do you think Mr Astor’ – her father-in-law William, later the first Lord Astor – ‘has done,’ she wrote to Phyllis. ‘Don’t breathe it even to Reggie ...”

“... In the movie, however, it provides the occasion for one of Hollywood’s happy endings, in which John Quincy Adams moves the Supreme Court to a recognition of human rights by eloquently invoking the Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately, this never happened. The justices did, indeed, send the Africans home, but their decision turned on maritime law and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 1581, and then a number of letters – business letters, essentially – to his half-brother Sir John Gilbert about privateering, shipping and local matters. There is nothing about the Virginia (Roanoke) Plantation, his rise at Court in the 1580s, or his intellectual activities. Only in his correspondence with Sir Robert Cecil in the 1590s do the letters ...”

“... his style. Cambridge added to the mix the sense of Britain’s manifest destiny entertained by Sir John Seeley and his followers and William Cunningham’s brand of Christian Conservatism. The discussion of Baldwin’s youth is professedly intended by Williamson to exhibit a ‘model of how examination of an interwar politician’s early life can genuinely and ...”