“... un-regally, being a ‘mother’s boy’. In the popular estimation he probably outranks Bad King John and Wicked King Richard III as the worst ever English king. He has this terrible reputation largely because of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This composite work is thought to have been first compiled in the 890s under the auspices of King Alfred, then copied ...”

“... In​ 1993, frustrated and unfulfilled, Emmanuel Carrère was waiting on two replies – one from Satan, the other from God. He was 35, with four novels behind him but not enough fame for his liking. On 9 January, a newspaper story offered hope: in a small town in the east of France, a man called Jean-Claude Romand had murdered his wife and children, and then his parents and their dog ...”

“... that the latter are art historians at all. He calls them ‘the fallen’, a category in which John Berger becomes Gombrich’s unlikely bedfellow: for the provocative reductionism of Berger’s Ways of Seeing, equating painting with property, shares with Art and Illusion an appeal to a firm wall of material fact.If the discourse of form collapsed, this ...”

“... not far from the President’s House, the third presidential mansion, where George Washington and John Adams lived, and a tourist destination for those who don’t leave colonial tours shaking the experience out of their heads as if in imitation of the Liberty Bell, Philly’s cracked symbol of freedom. For years, the historical society responsible for the ...”

“... this technique into his most significant creation, the Daily Mail. In 2012, the journalist John Rentoul produced a satirical essay on the art of the newspaper headline called Questions to Which the Answer Is ‘No!’ It was a homage to Harmsworth, the Mail and their many imitators. Harmsworth had a lifelong thirst for curious facts. On a world tour ...”

“... construction for more than a decade, and it is only because Young casts his net so wide (taking in John Betjeman’s travel documentaries and the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony among other things) that his choices don’t end up looking a little predictable. For this reason Offbeat is a useful supplement to his book (though it’s much more than that) since the ...”

“... which opened in 1925. She was, he said, the essential seventh artist in his stable, belonging with John Marin, Arthur Dove, Paul Strand, Charles Demuth, Hartley and O’Keeffe. O’Keeffe pitched in too, writing to Stettheimer: ‘I wish you would become ordinary like the rest of us and show your paintings this year!’ But Stettheimer wasn’t ordinary when ...”

“... they should have been under existing policy). Charles Clarke was replaced as home secretary by John Reid, who described the Home Office as ‘not fit for purpose’. Non-citizens with criminal records found themselves facing deportation. Current prisoners without British citizenship were identified, and when their sentences ended were held in prisons and ...”

“... about physics and a private detective with an eccentric JFK assassination conspiracy theory. John Sheddan, a lowlife of Bobby’s long acquaintance who forges prescriptions and deals drugs, puts it to Bobby that they have something in common: I know that you think we’re very different, me and thee. My father was a country storekeeper and yours a ...”

“... Nico, on which she sings some of the band’s best-known tracks, but they were not welcoming. John Cale recalled that, listening back to rehearsal tapes, they would ‘hear her go off-key or hit the wrong pitch at the start. We would sit there and snigger.’ Lou Reed, understandably, wanted to sing his songs himself, but Warhol and Morrissey were ...”

“... showed two of his early albums to Charles Rado, founder of the Rapho Agency. He passed them on to John Szarkowski, newly installed as photography curator at MoMA, who in 1963 put on what was only his third exhibition, devoted to 46 of Lartigue’s Belle Époque photographs. Lartigue was 69 when it opened. ‘Le tout New York is talking about … my little ...”

“... he disliked anti-slavery far more. In 1859 he led the detachment of US Marines that captured John Brown, following the failed raid on Harpers Ferry. But Lee considered Brown marginal, even ridiculous; as Guelzo shows, it was the emergence of the anti-slavery Republican Party that politicised him. On Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, seven Southern ...”

“... Dr Richard Barter, who got the measure of cholera twenty years before the more famous physician John Snow. The rising generation of British officials had a special reverence for the Arabs of the desert, with their ‘wild independence’ and ‘manly frankness’. Alliances with the Wahhabi were mooted seventy years before the explorer Captain William ...”

“... She does male drag with relish, especially the swaggering, leering, slouch-hatted variety. (John Huston, watching Monroe walk away from her audition for The Asphalt Jungle: ‘Sweet Jesus. Look at the ass on that little girl, will you?’) In the joyfully sleazy What I Lived For (1994), Oates adopts this voice for the duration of a novel, following a ...”

“... would go on to publish around thirty books, including titles by Clive Matson, Michael McClure and John Ashbery as well as Audre Lorde’s collection The First Cities.Despite her centrality to the community of artists and writers on the Lower East Side, di Prima’s work was never afforded the same respect as her fellow male ‘outriders’. She was excluded ...”