“... the remains of Josef Mengele and giving congressional testimony about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, among other high-profile cases. He died nine years ago, but the colourful interviews and writings he left behind enable Hagerty to provide a substantial account. In 1984, Snow, a chain-smoker in cowboy boots, was invited to Argentina by the ...”

“... were so untethered from reality that this was an argument they hadn’t heard. It wasn’t until John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), Moyn claims, that a liberal philosopher thought of defending cash transfer programmes.Moyn doesn’t really believe that his four Cold War liberals, much less all those to whom that label might conceivably be ...”

“... the gang and persuaded them to disperse. He followed up this act of personal bravery with what John Updike called ‘Franklin’s fiercest and most eloquent pamphlet’, A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County. During the Revolutionary Wars, the anti-slavery cause was put on hold. At the Constitutional Convention, Franklin decided against ...”

“... reconcile themselves to the new state of affairs, but by no means all. The political scientist John Whyte pointed out that ‘for civil war to break out, it is not necessary for a majority of inhabitants to desire it.’ Small groups can carry out sectarian assassinations that provoke reprisals and counter-reprisals. Protestant paramilitary groups ...”

“... a beard; Eurylochus is not an embittered rival to Odysseus but another helpful guy with a beard. John Leguizamo does his best with the part of Eumaeus, now cursed with cataracts to ensure that he is unable to recognise Odysseus until the right moment, but Nolan’s script gives him nothing to work with; the only wishof this ‘servant’ (the film’s ...”

“... going on.’‘Debbie blinked for two minutes when she was looking after Chris,’ the filmmaker John Waters has said, ‘and Madonna stole her career.’ Which is funny, because Harry’s appearance in Waters’s Hairspray (1988), playing a monstrous stage mother with a galleon hairdo opposite a properly lovely mother, played by Divine, was to me one of her ...”

“... of history (often themselves not aware of their vocation) have needed a prophet of their own: John the Baptist for Jesus, Aaron for Moses, Nathan of Gaza for Sabbatai Sevi, the innumerable éminences grises throughout history, if not, indeed, the powers behind the thrones. Nahman is not exactly an éminence grise, but he does bear witness to Jacob’s ...”

“... that a version of the Quran did exist around the time of Muhammad’s death, something the scholar John Wansbrough and some of his disciples denied for a long time, arguing that a ‘stable scriptural text’ did not emerge until up to two hundred years later. These early fragments had been erased and replaced on the top level of the palimpsest by the version ...”

“... first place. One number that Trump fixated on was 66 million. He had been told by the pollster John McLaughlin that if he could beat the 63 million votes he received in 2016 by three million then he was ‘absolutely guaranteed’ to be re-elected. In the event he got more than 74 million votes. He was so far ahead of what he should have needed to win that ...”

“... listeners with music, along with record shops, mail-order labels, American college radio and John Peel’s late evening show: a self-sustaining terrarium of ‘indie’ culture; a lost world.Music and life were indistinguishable for Reynolds in the decade after 1984, an intensely productive period that took in his entire employment at Melody ...”

“... affairs could seem quiescent and unrequited – even when they were requited – such as that with John White, alias Wingco, a Spitfire instructor and professor of Renaissance art history she slept with in Paris. There were several affairs, possibly flings, but the names don’t really matter, because the headline news for Brookner as the 1960s approached was ...”

“... who had died five years earlier. Submissions in 1955 were so dismal that he privately asked John Ashbery and O’Hara for manuscripts (Ashbery’s Some Trees was the winner).Rich and her fans have bristled at some of the condescending praise her early books received. Auden’s introduction to A Change of World (1951) characterised her poems as ‘neatly ...”

“... and 3000 of the rapidly produced 1860 second edition – books offered for sale by the publisher John Murray at the same time included 7600 copies of an account of the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin and 3200 copies of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help. From 1860 to 1865, the monthly sales of ‘the book that made the modern ...”

“... Nature by tracing the writings and life of the 19th-century British agrarian working-class poet John Clare,’ but letters to the writer and theorist Peter Wollen, her main married-man lover of the period, show her flailing: ‘I must get there, out of this endless selfishness a problem with always watching oneself … the autocratic autistic world that I ...”

“... had another connection to Jane Elgee before her marriage. In a letter to his son William in 1921, John Butler Yeats wrote of Jane Wilde: ‘When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs Butt found her with her husband when the circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it.’ Butt enjoyed various romances, and was, on occasion, heckled at public meetings by the ...”