“... still in print and much read. The translators there are Lydia Davis, James Grieve, Mark Treharne, John Sturrock, Carol Clark, Peter Collier and Ian Patterson.The afterlife of Scott Moncrieff’s 1922-30 version is interesting too. First, not all of it is his. He died before he was able to turn to Proust’s last volume, which was translated first by Stephen ...”

“... by the work of Walter Pater, and by her friendships with Henry James, Robert Browning and John Singer Sargent. But she was never swayed to the extent that she relinquished her intellectual independence. An atheist and materialist, she had no time for contemporary flirtations with the occult. In 1885 she attended a meeting of the Society for Psychical ...”

“... masters, especially Tallis (1989) and Josquin (1993), and an influential recording of Bach’s St John Passion (1991). For the Bach recordings, Parrott employed no more than two singers on each of the chorus parts and used the same singers for the arias. This was a response to traditional choral society performances, which tended to deploy a full ...”

“... another five years, despite continuing tensions over loan repayments and the warning of its boss, John Hope Simpson, a former Indian Civil Service official, that the ‘unpleasant duty’ of debt collection and mass evictions would ‘probably lead to revolution’. Yet the League continued to roll out unpopular debt-led development projects. In the early ...”

“... Among philosophers​ of the 20th century, John Langshaw Austin is not a cultural celebrity like Heidegger, Russell, Sartre or Wittgenstein. But for a period after the Second World War, he was the leading figure of the school of ordinary language philosophy that dominated Oxford, achieved substantial influence in the wider Anglophone world and left its stamp for a much longer time on the way analytic philosophers work, think and write ...”

“... not replace practical images that taught foetal presentations and interventions. The York midwife John Burton commissioned George Stubbs to draw birth figures for his new manual; Stubbs mostly painted portraits of horses, and the learning curve was steep. His foetuses are strange, suffering creatures, awkward and cramped and resigned to the fate of being ...”

“... continued ever since. Perhaps the most serious accusations were levelled by the British journalist John Cornwell, whose book Hitler’s Pope, published in 1999, in effect painted Pius XII as a Nazi sympathiser. Decades before his election as pope on 2 March 1939, Eugenio Pacelli had served as papal nuncio to Bavaria, and in this capacity had witnessed the ...”

“... who Trump believed had cost him the popular vote in 2016. The census bureau’s chief scientist, John Abowd, estimated that at least 630,000 households (mainly Asian Americans and Latinos) were likely to be deterred, resulting in fewer congressional seats (and electoral college votes) as well as reduced federal spending in Democrat-leaning states. The ...”

“... the use of the bomb, while the 31 August 1946 issue of the New Yorker had been entirely devoted to John Hersey’s unsparing account of what the nuclear attack had meant for civilians in Hiroshima. Stimson’s 7300-word testimonial – which was in fact written by McGeorge Bundy, later national security adviser to Kennedy and Johnson, with input and edits from ...”

“... three short, pictorial essays about three dope-fiend authors, Thomas de Quincey, Marcel Schwob and John Keats. The essays are clearly the product of much reading – Jaeggy has translated Schwob’s Vies imaginaires and De Quincey’s Last Days of Immanuel Kant into Italian – though it’s the reading not of a scholar but an artist, interested only in what ...”

“... so that the frontier was now seen as a gateway to world power and economic abundance. (John F. Kennedy’s reference to a ‘new frontier’ in his speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president in 1960 carried this implication.) The myth of a West dominated by small family farms (Jefferson’s vision of the future) had already given way ...”

“... of Evans-Lewes made Bodichon willing to contemplate a ‘free union’ with Evans’s ex-partner John Chapman, the editor of the Westminster Review, which was nearly disastrous. In 1855, Chapman wrote a series of letters begging her to have sex with him and, if possible, marry him. Her father and brother discovered that he was in desperate need of her ...”

“... biography, Travels over Feeling, the 15-year-old Russell is already referring to Walt Whitman, John Cage and Allen Ginsberg (prefiguring later, more explicit involvements with queer sexuality, paganism and utopian politics). There is also an Alan Watts name-drop and a lot of talk about Buddhism.It isn’t easy, reading the early pages of Travels over ...”

“... will. Sparks, she said, ‘was a man with a very good heart’. On the other side was someone like John Groth, an artist who’d known Sparks at Parade: ‘He was probably the most antisemitic guy I ever met in my life. He was Jewish, but he despised all Jews. He was always making cracks about the Jews; worried when a guy came to be hired with a name like ...”

“... there were spent rockets in the gutters and the scent of woodsmoke and gunpowder hung in the air.John Withington’s meticulous history of fireworks begins with childhood memories that resemble my own: his Bonfire Nights were in Manchester in the 1950s and mine two decades later in Kent, but almost everything was the same. Fireworks were the centrepiece, not ...”