“... the aftermath of Castle Bravo, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb that was exploded over Bikini in 1954, John Anjain, a magistrate from nearby Rongelap, reported that ‘women gave birth to creatures that did not resemble human beings: some of the creatures looked like monkeys, some like octopi, some like bunches of grapes.’A little north of the equator, and just ...”

“... supporters seem to see limits to liberalism. On 20 February the Free Church Daily Mail columnist John MacLeod tweeted that ‘Kate Forbes was thrown untold gotcha questions today about same-sex marriage etc, but handled them well. I unaccountably missed all the interviews when Humza Yousaf was asked about how he felt about suicide-bombers and the sort of ...”

“... on disability benefit, so they wouldn’t show up in unemployment figures. In the early 1990s, John Major’s secretary of state for social security, Peter Lilley, began to focus on Invalidity Benefit, or, as he called it, ‘bad back benefit’. Announcing his intention to close down ‘the something-for-nothing society’ at the Conservative Party ...”

“... The afterlife of Surrealism is more active in poetry, as in the New York School of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and others: ‘We all “grew up Surrealist”,’ Ashbery once remarked, ‘without even being aware of it.’ Surrealist directives – to suspend rational control as much as possible, to let language dictate, to hold to the first thought as the ...”

“... she could assume that her readers cared about British history and knew who William Morris and John Ruskin were. Sasson’s story is written for our ...”

“... she also spends a great deal of time searching for the perfect paper to line her kitchen shelves. John Leonard thought Lucinella ‘the nicest person ever to appear in a novel about New York writers’.Several of her later stories also drop a fantastic conceit into a recognisable social situation: a little Kafka to unsettle the Austenian flow of ...”

“... thing is that only the National Theatre audiences saw and were stunned by this performance. Though John Schlesinger later filmed the play (where HMQ was supported by her corgis) the magic didn’t quite transfer. But Pru was the first and the best. In the central scene of the play the queen has a long conversation with the keeper of the royal pictures, Sir ...”

“... white supremacy. After losing the gubernatorial election of 1958 to the even more racist John Patterson, Wallace vowed never to allow himself to be outdone in playing the race card. He was elected governor in 1962, for the first of four terms. ‘Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,’ he proclaimed in his inaugural ...”

“... of 1949 was designed to challenge the ‘false doctrines’ of communism in the Third World. John F. Kennedy set up the US Agency for International Aid in 1961 and in 1971 USAID was joined by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (which was absorbed into the Development Finance Corporation in 2019). In the eye of this hurricane of acronyms, two ...”

“... wars, the eruption of 1794 was, at least from a cartoonist’s point of view, fortuitous.John Brewer’s large and somewhat rambling survey of the cultural significance of Vesuvius begins with an attempt to draw a single thread from this tangled story. He starts with a visitors’ book, now in the Harvard library, which covers the period from ...”

“... only in the South. The government sought to destroy King’s reputation. With the authorisation of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, the FBI listened in on his phone calls with close associates and planted informers in his circle. Convinced the civil rights movement was a communist plot, J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men gathered recordings of his trysts with women ...”

“... steals The Magnificent Seven not through hat-waving and underplaying, but because he laid siege to John Sturges to persuade him to increase the size of his role, and was charming and animated on-screen while everyone else was busy being dour. Charles Bronson and James Coburn were underplaying each other into inanimacy; Brynner was playing Gary Cooper. McQueen ...”

“... though more often in the background. Martin Middlebrook’s The First Day on the Somme and John Keegan’s The Face of Battle are the mini-masterpieces I remember from school; this century, Antony Beevor, Max Hastings and Holland have led the British pack. The history of war is now certainly more palatable to academia: King’s College, London has a ...”

“... Sunrise promoter turned cybercriminal Tony Colston-Hayter, were straight-up capitalists.) When John Major launched his ‘Back to Basics’ campaign in 1993, ravers were an obvious target. A year later, his government passed the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which gave the police the power to shut down any nocturnal open-air gathering of more ...”