“... to bolster the movie’s plot – the future Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, Archbishop John Hughes and the showman P.T. Barnum – are either transported backwards in time or engage in alliances with gangs that defy the actual marginality of these gangs within the class and power structure of the mid-century city. As for Gangs of New York’s ...”

“... cannot be assimilated to that encoded on the processor of a computer, how are we to understand it? John Gurdon demonstrated in the 1970s that the nucleus of a fully differentiated adult frog cell can be ‘reprogrammed’ by transferring it into a fertilised egg from which the nucleus has been removed: embryonic development follows. The same experiment was ...”

“... socialist and family planner, promoted vaginal diaphragms in heroic defiance of the Comstock laws, but also urged the sterilisation of racial inferiors. Is the conjunction of race and liberal freedoms any less surreal today, when, in the common African-American jest-cum-genuine-complaint, the police are seen to clamp down vigorously on the offence of ...”

“... was common sense. Fish, ‘being highly alkalescent, wants to be qualified by Salt and Vinegar’, John Arbuthnot pronounced, but anybody could see this was fish and chips spun as science. In other ways, things were becoming much more complicated. In the 1830s and 1840s, chemists began to tabulate the elements in food. Nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur and iron ...”

“... she should take the fight all the way to the Democratic convention in August. And then there was John McCain, in what seemed to be a high school auditorium somewhere in Louisiana (even he wasn’t sure: he thought he was in New Orleans, but he wasn’t), addressing a few hundred sleepy geriatrics, struggling with the teleprompter and grinning weirdly at ...”

“... counsel Vince Foster (who committed suicide in 1993) in order to cover up her transgressions. John Knox was surely right to label his 1558 diatribe against powerful women only The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, so well developed is the tradition of denigrating women thought to exercise influence from behind the ...”

“... But the remark was not as self-deprecating as it looks. It was among other things an allusion to John Stuart Mill, who had opened his own very celebrated Autobiography with a similar disclaimer: he had nothing to offer, he said, apart from an account of the origin and growth of his philosophical convictions, and ‘the reader whom these things do not ...”

“... epileptics began to hide themselves from public view, or else, as in the case of Prince John, the epileptic fifth son of George V, they were hidden away by their families. The rise of eugenics made things much worse. Eugenicists fixated on epilepsy as a hereditary threat to be tackled by both negative and positive countermeasures. By 1914, 13 US ...”

“... Christianity when so lightly passing over the reference to the lamb of God in the Revelation of St John: ‘Come hither, I will show thee the Bride, the Lamb’s wife’ (21.9). John Boswell, in Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, sees in this metaphor ‘a hint of bestiality’ which raises problems that ‘were rarely ...”

“... English Woman’s Journal in 1858, establishing an employment register for women, agitating with John Stuart Mill for divorce and married women’s property reform, and helping to found Girton College, Cambridge. Barbara both illustrated in her own life and commented on the ironic complexities of women’s status. As Sheila Herstein points out (in a rare ...”

“... before a special jury, at Warwickshire Assizes. The defendants included the venerable Major John Cartwright, the ‘Father’ of English Reformers; the editor of the Radical Black Dwarf, T.J. Wooler; and Edmonds, the secretary of the Birmingham reformers. Their offences arose out of the same context as the Peterloo meeting in support of manhood ...”

“... councillors) who were unhappy with the decisions that had been made on the budget – the mayor, John Biggs, was seen by the left as a Blairite stooge. Sympathetic insiders passed on intel. People from the campaign turned up at Biggs’s weekly surgery, introducing Expand Not Extinguish and demanding that the council consult with them. Biggs agreed, on ...”

“... relations. The result would of course be a state-nation, a country defined by its institutions and laws rather than by its ethnos or imagined kinship. The only nationalism it can lay claim to will have a civic character, and political history must take the place of common descent or language. Time alone will turn such history into something like instinct, the ...”

“... Fifty years, almost to the month, before the publication of John Adamson’s book, Hugh Trevor-Roper stated his intention to write what he knew would be ‘a very long book’, the most ambitious of his career, on the Puritan revolution of 17th-century England. The project went through many mutations over the next four years, but by 1961 it was virtually complete ...”

“... wall in King’s Cross Station. Anna’s father reckoned that the Hadmans were related to the poet John Clare, who came from Helpston, a village near their own. Our investigation drew many previously unknown Hadmans from the ground where they had lain, undisturbed, for hundreds of years. They were known to each other, some of them, but unknown to us: lives ...”