“... conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the Dutch conductor Frans Brüggen and the British conductors John Eliot Gardiner, Trevor Pinnock and Christopher Hogwood became pioneers of what became known as ‘historically informed practice’, the aim being to liberate the music from the sentimentalised baggage and mannerisms imposed by misreadings and lazy ...”

“... would have turned not to Jewish men like Shylock but to Christians like Shakespeare’s father, John (who was accused of illegal usury at least twice). The small population of Jews in medieval England had been expelled in 1290 and would not be readmitted until 1656, nearly half a century after Shakespeare’s death. This didn’t stop the English of ...”

“... University, where the novel stages a postdated, highly fanciful version of Derrida’s clash with John Searle and pushes the boat out still further on the story’s farcical and shaggy-dog aspects. Methodological tensions play out like scuffles between the Jets and the Sharks: ‘You analytic pricks!’ ‘Take your Derrida boys and piss ...”

“... would be a terrible piece of phrasing even if it didn’t tap into a deep pop-cultural memory of John Travolta’s voice.) Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, one of Cioran’s translators, described her job in the introduction to On the Heights of Despair as equivalent to the experience of Jacob, who wrestled with an angel all night long – ‘the translator ...”

“... family of these witnesses; we never hear the voice of an interviewer. One of the most beguiling is John Musgrave, a Marine so badly wounded in Vietnam that several doctors rated him ‘expected’. He became a drop-out and an alcoholic, a would-be suicide and a protester who is still battling the melodrama of the war and the effects of his wounds. He is now a ...”

“... period. Bevilacqua refers to that period as the Enlightenment. As the intellectual historian John Robertson pointed out in The Enlightenment: A Short Introduction (2015), two distinct conceptions of the European Enlightenment are currently in circulation. According to the first, commonly held by philosophers and public intellectuals, the Enlightenment ...”

“... Kind of Scotland?’, at Edinburgh University. Its centrepiece was the first reading of John McGrath’s play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, a bracingly radical tour through the history of what Nairn described as Scotland’s ‘self-colonisation’. Nairn couldn’t make it – even here, with a more liberating nationalism ...”

“... back on stage a year later and complained he had lost ‘$35 million in an hour’. The journalist John Hockenberry was fired from New York Public Radio when old allegations of workplace bullying were suddenly deemed sufficient. This happened just before an article about his sexual behaviour was published. He is one of the few men who have attempted to write ...”

“... the road with the psychologist J.C. Flügel and the philosopher Cyril Joad, and reported back to John O’ London’s Weekly. His Leaves from a Psychist’s Casebook (1933) and Confessions of a Ghost-Hunter (1936) were bestsellers. The BBC frequently broadcast about the supernatural while cultural conservatives also cashed in. In a Britain carved up by ...”

“... Essex in 1953 and 1955. He then turns to Raphael Samuel’s interviews in Stevenage in 1959-60 and John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood’s surveys in Cambridge and Luton in the early 1960s to trace the way migration to the ‘new towns’ and rising prosperity affected those attitudes. Next he mines the questionnaires gathered by researchers working with ...”

“... where the Second Continental Congress is refusing to debate a proposal for American independence. John Adams hops back and forth, his diction slicing the King’s English into definitive new states. Thomas Jefferson, dressed in mauve, so sexual he can barely speak coherently, lounges on the window seat in a soft-focus rapist’s reverie, dreaming of not ...”

“... money with the new programmes. Throughout, he pays fulsome tribute to his late employer, Senator John McCain, a prominent exemplar of the ‘maverick’ syndrome, prolix in eloquent denunciations of sacred military cows, while never taking any practical action to discommode the Pentagon on any important matter – and certainly not in the invocation of China ...”

“... It took two Holyrood votes and a no confidence motion against the deputy first minister, John Swinney, before he finally shared the legal advice the Scottish government received about the judicial review brought by Salmond. Even then, the information Swinney released was incomplete and reached the committee the night before Sturgeon was due to give ...”

“... to see into the experiences of those around him, an oafish Thackeray, and Dickens’s biographer John Forster, who SHOUTS IN CAPITALS, as well as George Cruikshank the angry cartoonist.Male novelists, however, are peripheral to The Fraud. At its centre is the strange case of the Tichborne Claimant, which dominated the news and the popular imagination through ...”

“... being central to any of the novels’ plots as they unfold.Val McDermid has called Herron ‘the John le Carré of our generation’ (a phrase plastered on all the paperback covers) and Herron acknowledged the debt, long before she said that, in the first Slough House book, Slow Horses (2010): one of the characters was given ‘le Carré’s collected ...”