“... Carlo Ginzburg became famous as a historian for extraordinary discoveries about popular belief, and what was taken by its persecutors to be witchcraft, in the early modern period. The Night Battles and The Cheese and the Worms, each a case-study from the north-east corner of Italy, were followed by a synthesis of Eurasian sweep in Ecstasies. The work that has appeared since is no less challenging, but there has been a significant alteration of its forms, and many of its themes ...”

“... studied theatre in Paris for a short time, and then returned to Ireland, playing a small part in John Ford’s film The Quiet Man and working for a time at the Gate Theatre with Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir. In the summer of 1953 he directed Siobhán McKenna and Cyril Cusack in The Playboy of the Western World, playing the part of Shawn Keogh ...”

“... Marie Laurencin seems far too feeble to mention; so too, I’m afraid, does Vanessa Bell. Gwen John? Not exactly a she-titan of the brush. Elaine de Kooning? The canonisation of wives has never seemed to me an effective feminist strategy. Dame Laura Knight? I love her, but does anyone else? Joan Mitchell? Marvellous but … uhhh … I peter out at Number ...”

“... years later Aelius Aristides would have his oracles commemorated on the orders of Asclepius, ‘John’ on the orders of Jesus, and Muhammad on the orders of Allah. After hearing a few pages of jeremiad, however, King Jehoiakim chops up Jeremiah’s prophetic text and throws it on the fire. Jeremiah, on God’s advice, makes another copy with extra fire and ...”

“... imagination Carter may perform, she always comes to rest in the right ideological position,’ John Bayley wrote in a notoriously slighting 1992 review: the ballet idea works well, but otherwise he’s a bit tin-eared. A ‘moral pornographer’, Carter called herself sometimes; she could also have called herself an ideological choreographer. It’s not ...”

“... Framing the matter like this isn’t to accept as proven the ‘impossibility theorem’ of John Bellamy Foster, according to which there can be no ecologically sound capitalism. Nor is it to take it for granted that the next mode of production (and pollution) will necessarily be greener than that of the Soviet bloc, where the USSR drained away the Aral ...”

“... it was very reassuring but also a bit ominous.’The Irish Sea: ‘Fish don’t do borders’ (John Lynch, a fisherman, quoted in the Irish Times, 14 December 2018).Jeremy Corbyn: ‘Delusional’ (Irish Independent, 12 December 2018). ‘The fact that there has been no leadership from Corbyn on Brexit will be something the party and the country may rue ...”

“... most is getting the public on their side. He learned this while rehabilitating the reputation of John D. Rockefeller after the Ludlow Massacre, in which striking coal workers and their families were gunned down at a mine Rockefeller owned. Lee helped turn Rockefeller from ‘a man routinely described as the most hated man in America into a kindly ...”

“... failure in her personal life. I don’t view her personal life as a failure. Unlike her biographer John Peter Nettl, I don’t see the years after her break-up with Jogiches as the ‘lost years’. Nor do I consider that, as Adrienne Rich suggests, Luxemburg’s life is evidence that a woman’s ‘central relationship can be to her work, even as lovers come ...”

“... we in a Catholic church?’ She had once stabbed a priest to death in a film involving John Mills so knew about churches. ‘Yes,’ she said firmly. At which point a plumpish man in a cassock crossed the chancel in order to collect a book from a pew, bowing to the altar en route. ‘See that,’ said the interviewer. ‘The bowing? That’s part ...”

“... home. And the guy at the desk said, not with these charges you aren’t.’In June 1989, Judge John Miller presided over a ‘waiver’ hearing to decide whether, given the seriousness of the charges, Gordon’s case should be transferred (‘waived’) from the juvenile court to an adult court. A psychologist who interviewed Gordon recommended a ...”

“... another group crossed a police cordon. Ten people were arrested; a few were elderly, including John Lynes, a legendary arrestable in his nineties. Behind the police cordon, where most demonstrators remained, four or five people in flowing red shifts appeared, walking at a painfully slow pace along the tarmac, gesturing mysteriously ahead of them, stopping ...”

“... conference (‘Geneva II’) in January 2014. On the very first day, the US secretary of state, John Kerry, declared: ‘There is no way, no way possible, that a man who has led a brutal response to his own people can regain legitimacy to govern.’ So the US position was unchanged: Assad had to go, which meant that the Syrian government would not engage in ...”

“... the BBC who couldn’t be public, but we can name them now – Ken Trodd, Ken Loach, Tony Garnett, John McGrath. You know, from the cultural milieu. There was Clive, Fred Halliday, later Sheila Rowbotham got involved, and Roger Smith, script editor at the BBC. The French May erupted as we were about to launch the first issue, which had come out looking ...”

“... September, and had made an additional $72 million in 2001 from his stock options.) On 25 July, John Rigas, the former head of Adelphia Communications, was arrested, along with his two sons, on corporate crime charges. They were accused of using the company ‘as the Rigas family’s personal piggy-bank’, spending hundreds of millions of the ...”