“... army reflect, more than in most other countries, those of the society as a whole.’ General Sir John Hackett has suggested (Sunday Times, 20 June 1982) that Britain’s military success in the Falklands will probably have an encouraging influence on Sweden’s attitude to neutrality – in the face of increasing Soviet pressure, evident in recent submarine ...”

“... have led Hizbullah to retreat to the Litani river. As the US national security spokesman John Kirby pointed out, the proposal ‘wasn’t just drawn up in a vacuum. It was done after careful consultation, not only with the countries that signed onto it, but Israel itself.’ Instead, as he has done repeatedly in the Gaza negotiations, Netanyahu ...”

“... their slaves, their excesses of despotism. At the same time even a light-hearted impresario like John Rich was aiming at targets closer to home, as Bridget Orr explains in an essay on the Oriental theatre. But it was the example of Scheherazade that the writers who flocked to ventriloquise Oriental tale-tellers took to heart. The most obvious lesson absorbed ...”

“... Riders, the first book he appears in. His fiancée, Helen, spends all her savings on an Augustus John drawing of a horse for his wedding present. She gives him it, goes to answer the doorbell, and when she comes back fifteen minutes later finds him looking at the drawing with satisfaction. ‘That’s better.’ ‘What?’ said Helen. Then, noticing a ...”

“... ditch, while another (a dancing master, maybe) skips into the limelight. The Elizabethan satirist John Marston was repeatedly mocked for his line ‘Let custards quake, my rage must freely run,’ but his opposition between a wobbling but self-contained cowardly custard (he is thinking of a set custard rather than a sauce) and his own free-flowing inspired ...”

“... elsewhere on the island, or even as lieutenant to a completely different pirate ‘king’ called John Plantain. It’s a confusing picture. ‘What,’ Graeber asks, ‘is one to make of all this?’In Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia he tries to answer this question. As the title suggests, for Graeber there is more at stake here than one would ...”

“... League, with the title ‘How Not to Translate Marx’. The translator he had in mind was John Broadhouse, a pseudonym for the journalist Henry Mayers Hyndman, who was notorious both for his socialism and his pronounced antisemitism (he once said of Marx’s daughter Eleanor that she ‘inherited in her nose and mouth the Jewish type from Marx ...”

“... in his filial loyalty. An early test of parliamentary allegiance arose in 1769 after the outlawed John Wilkes returned to London to contest the seat of the City of London and his supporters were fired on by soldiers. Fox, still on good terms with North and his ministers, spoke against Wilkes in the Commons, where his chief antagonist was Burke. Burke told the ...”

“... The Stud and Confessions of a Sex Maniac. Hodge had a colourful line in ex-boyfriends, including John Bindon, an actor-gangster who had holidayed with Princess Margaret and was tried for murder. The days of wine and roses for the pre-hyphenated Windsors left a few stains on the carpet, but the royals still acted as if they were beyond reproach.Mummy loved ...”

“... the US consul general in Lagos complained in 1949. A couple of decades later, a Ghanaian called John Ackah Blay-Miezah spun stories of a fortune that had been stashed away from British colonists and could only be accessed if he raised enough money.* ‘Nkrumah liberated his people politically,’ Blay-Miezah claimed. ‘I am going to liberate them ...”

“... Palestinian sniper who had spotted him in a car on the east side. If the Daily Telegraph reporter John Bulloch hadn’t known how to apply pressure to the wound, Mr Tim, as the Commodore staff affectionately called him, would have bled to death. His wound was deeper than mine, but he was gracious with his sympathy and we stayed up much of the night toasting ...”

“... entire population of the Steller’s sea cow in just three decades. According to the historians John L. Brooke and Chris Otter, ‘since 1600, at least 484 animals and 654 plants have become extinct. The “natural” rate of extinction is one species … every 700 years.’ They also point out that carbon dioxide emissions from land use (deforestation and ...”

“... simply don’t know how old they are. The most complete and compendious of these scholarly works, John Burrow’s The Ages of Man (1986), reaches back through Medieval to Classical times to show how very differently existence was measured before our own pervasive if shallow mathematical and technological revolution. He reminds us that the Gospels record no ...”

“... 1919, just as de Valera was departing for the United States, a letter was received via Paris from John Devoy, the Fenian leader who since the 1870s had been a key figure among the Irish in America, giving news of a split on the subject of Ireland’s strategic relations to Britain which thereafter divided Irish America. Three letters from de Valera to the ...”

“... also produced the first of the notorious Nobel injustices: Charles Best did not get the Prize; John Macleod, who was off fishing in Scotland during the crucial experiments, did.) Or penicillin. Anne Miller, the first patient to be saved by the antibiotic, died on 27 May this year at the age of 90. Her hospital chart from 1942, showing the dramatic break in ...”