“... of Amherst’, dressed in that distinctive ghost-white dress, which features in the movie Being John Malkovich. A hitherto ‘unknown’ photograph of Dickinson recently advertised on E-Bay, the Internet auction site. Shady dealings in allegedly ‘new’ poems by Dickinson – discovered, authenticated, sold and discredited. I recently received a flyer ...”

“... who worked with him briefly, and in whom he had no interest (and of whom he had no memory), was John Cage. Goldfinger claimed to be a lifelong Marxist, but he never joined the Communist Party. In 1931, he met Ursula Blackwell, a woman of enormous resilience and wit who was then studying painting with Amédée Ozenfant. They married in 1933 and moved the ...”

“... interested in the work of Fernand Léger, whose latest paintings combined Cubism and Futurism: John Golding has construed Malevich’s 1912 painting The Knife Grinder: Principle of Flickering as ‘a marriage between Léger’s Woman in Blue and Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase of 1912’. Like Duchamp’s painting, The Knife Grinder depicted motion ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... simply; even the distinction I have just made fails to dispel the suspicion of liberal partiality. John Rawls’s reputation is built on his monumental A Theory of Justice, published in 1971. But in later years, he not only refined the details of his account of justice as fairness; he also reconstructed its mode of presentation so that it might illuminate and ...”

“... this mood, which contrasted strongly with the social documentaries produced in the 1930s by John Grierson, who subordinated questions of aesthetics to the dispassionate recording of reality. Marker disavowed cinéma vérité, describing his own documentary style as ‘ciné, ma vérité’; he makes no attempt to erase his own presence. Le Joli ...”

“... of mental vigour and resolve to overcome obstacles, which is indispensable to successful war.’ John Colville, Churchill’s secretary, recorded that ‘Churchill tried his hardest to elicit the general’s views and was met with the silence of shyness,’ while Wavell thought Churchill’s tactical ideas had got stuck somewhere around the time of the Boer ...”

“... passages is where she describes how she used to bore Home Secretaries with her official briefings. John Major once told her to leave because he found himself dropping off; Michael Howard used to ‘rock and lurch in his chair’ to try to keep awake; and Douglas Hurd’s technique was to ‘sink far down into his chair and hood his eyes so you could not tell ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... bullets and if they come for me I am going to open fire.’ It is strange to hear George Bush and John Reid deny that a civil war is going on, given that so many bodies – all strangled, shot or hanged solely because of their religious allegiance – are being discovered every day. Car bombs exploded in the markets in the great Shia slum of Sadr City in ...”