“... and there was nothing like empire to give vanity rocket-like lift. In Karsh’s photograph of John Buchan, who was governor of Canada in the 1930s, the wildly popular novelist wears a North American Indian war bonnet, his weathered face is in semi-profile, he’s wearing gloves, and he looks as if he could take on an army on his own. Sargent’s portrait ...”

“... For the girl has agreed to adoption: the baby is given to the Smiths of Seattle. They name him John, a choice that Alexie uses to signal a well-meaning lack of imagination, and when John Smith grows up, Indian-born but raised by whites, he will become the chief suspect in the search for the Indian Killer. It’s not an ...”

“... John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, one of the original ‘amorous sons of Wadham’, perhaps took part in writing an obscene farce called Sodom. Dr Walker drily observes that ‘to assert this twenty years ago would have damaged Rochester’s reputation as much as to deny it today.’ We are certainly more able than many of our predecessors to accept that this poetry was of some importance for its age ...”

“... institution’ – an accolade bestowed in 1924, on the occasion of a special visit by King George V and Queen Mary towards the end of the season. The programme culminated, at the king’s request, with the Sea Songs (he found ‘Rule, Britannia!’ a ‘jolly fine tune’, infinitely to be preferred to ‘The ...”

“... bread, till thou return unto the ground.’ The New English Bible translates as ‘labour’ what King James’s scholars called ‘sorrow’ – ‘Accursed shall be the ground on your account. With labour you shall win your food from it.’ A few pages later comes the very odd passage in which Noah’s son Ham sees him naked when drunk. Awakening from his ...”

“... is this, written by the man who made it?It would be hard to deliver a brief biographical sketch of John Boorman that was tidy or plausible. Yet it would be harder still to leave a reader in any doubt about his integrity, his passion and his blithe disdain for success, more radiant than gloomy. At 87, it’s his life, and he has resolved to treat it as a ...”

“... way absorbed the classical liberal precepts associated with the 17th-century English philosopher John Locke: adherence to limited government, respect for personal liberty and the sanctity of private property. Americans hadn’t needed a revolution of the French kind to win these freedoms: the country had gained autonomy from Britain without having to ...”

“... draws inspiration from 18th-century and Romantic writers: a verse recipe in the manner of William King, 21 ‘Vignettes’ based on engravings by Thomas Bewick, and some distinctly Wordsworthian landscape poems feature in his collection. But where Clampitt hops about dottily – despite the decorous appearance of her stanzas – snatching at bits of Keats and ...”

“... Brancusi didactically entitled Adam and Eve, Socrates, Little French Girl and – shown below – King of Kings (Spirit of Buddha) together define the breadth of the perceived cultural malaise and the role of self-conscious primitivism as plasma: ‘self-conscious’ because it was the product of educated, independent, ego-driven artistic choice rather than a ...”

“... of aristocratic families in decline, who retained pretentions to mighty connections (such as King John Sobieski) even as they subsided into ruin. His father Jan Norwid died in a debtors’ prison, and his mother died when he was only four. The Polish youth of the period was devoted to plotting and to fantasies of vengeance. In secret ...”

“... back out into space. The existence of the effect was first posited in 1859 by the Irish scientist John Tyndall, who said that without the greenhouse effect ‘the warmth of our fields and gardens would pour itself unrequited into space, and the sun would rise upon an island held fast in the iron grip of frost’. The Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius added to ...”

“... that at every turn the narrative seems to play itself out before our eyes, the first volume of John Richardson’s long-awaited Life of Picasso will leave its readers waiting impatiently for Volume Two. Long may it go on. Meanwhile it is a special kind of pleasure to be able to praise the book of an old and close friend, and be confident that the praise ...”

“... In 1830 the prophet John Wroe asked his congregation of Christian Israelites in Ashton-under-Lyne for seven virgins to serve in his household. The Israelites had already built a Sanctuary and four gatehouses at Ashton, in the belief that the Lancashire cotton town was to be the site of the New Jerusalem. Mr Wroe got his virgins, but less than a year later he was almost lynched by his flock after the church elders had acquitted him on charges of indecency ...”

“... of history among younger people, may be to blame. In his autobiography Grace Before Ploughing, John Masefield – himself an excellent historical writer for children – recalls that he was early made aware ‘of a Civil War feeling, that Hereford and the Welsh had stood for the King, and that across the Severn to the ...”

“... in England. It was marvellous what bogeys she discovered lurking in apparently blameless texts: ‘John Gilpin’, for instance, ‘because it places an honest, industrious tradesman, worthy to be held out as an example of prudence and economy to men of his rank, in a ridiculous situation, and provokes a laugh at the expense of conjugal affection’. Robinson ...”