“... the first to isolate the secreted substance. The leaders were an academic pharmacologist – John Jacob Abel at Johns Hopkins University – and an industrial chemist called Jokichi Takamine who was working in New York for the pharmaceutical company Parke-Davis. Takamine won by being the first to identify – and name – adrenaline, but confusingly ...”

“... wanted to be buried in the Trinity Church cemetery, in their neighbourhood in New York, where John James Audubon and John Jacob Astor were also buried: The plots were all taken, but the cemetery offered a vault in its ten-storey mausoleum . . . Pallbearers carried the coffin outside to a wall of burial vaults . . . a ...”

“... your grace to tell me why is it that Spaniards, when they’re about to go into battle, invoke St James the Moor-Slayer and say: “St James, and close Spain!” By some chance is Spain open so that it’s necessary to close her, or what ceremony is that?’In describing​ pre-Islamic Arabia, the period of Jahiliya (the ...”

“... Hogarth’, exemplified in particular in a critique of his work by the Irish painter and critic James Barry. Acknowledging Hogarth’s merit – his ‘admirable fund of invention’, the moral quality of his satire, ‘seldom or never employed in a dishonest or unmanly way’ – Barry had nevertheless claimed that his ‘general aim’ was not to ‘reach ...”

“... rapidly-burgeoning field of molecular biology. The French geneticist and Nobel laureate François Jacob recalled: After the war, many young physicists were disgusted by the military use that had been made of atomic energy ... Some looked to biology with a mixture of diffidence and hope ... To hear one of the fathers of quantum mechanics ask himself, ‘What ...”

“... technoscientific assumptions of Western civilisation. These highbrow animadversions on the classic Jacob Bronowski Ascent of Man vision of science, onwards and upwards, show up in a plethora of more popular anti-scientistic writings and talks. The reasons for this ‘rage against reason’ may seem easy to find. The systematic destruction of nature – of the ...”

“... is of New York’. Whitman’s desire to embody the city is set against the closed world of Henry James and Edith Wharton. Conrad shows O’Henry and Stephen Crane plucking characters from the crowd; Jacob Riis using photography to document the inhumanities of slum tenements, Stieglitz using it to make skyscrapers ...”

“... Queen’s Gallery’s absorbing historical survey of the reign of the second Charles (and that of James II, his brother and successor, no better a politician than their father) opens with the 1649 post-execution proclamation, which still has the power to challenge us: ‘The office of a king is unnecessary, burthensom and dangerous to the liberty, safety and ...”

“... have been better selected; if the younger Sickert deserves any credence, a certain Francis E. James is one of the great painters of the 1890s, but maybe his works, like many others mentioned here, have sunk too deep in the historical oubliette to be retrieved. And then, one might complain that the sheer scholarly discretion of the editing under-represents ...”

“... 60, has lived, struggled with and taught Marx since he was 18, when his professor of religion, Jacob Taubes, told him about a book, only just published in the States, that Marx had written ‘when he was still a kid, before he became Karl Marx’. What the young Berman found in the young Marx – i.e. in the 1844 manuscripts – was a passionate ...”

“... begin a letter to a woman with an Italian name ‘Dear Dago’, while the state’s other senator, James Eastland, would not only glare at New York’s Jewish senator, Jacob Javits, and say things like ‘I don’t like you or your kind’ but actually proposed that Congress limit the number of Jews conducting interstate ...”

“... spell at the Slade lived the life of an aesthete-dilettante: ‘with a friend he brought the young Jacob Epstein from America, helping to pay his keep.’ His first marriage quickly collapsed and was followed by a breakdown. His second wife, Kate Kirby, who was to prove his indispensable and warmly-praised partner at the Spreadeagle, was ‘practical and ...”

“... at the Folies Bergère and all over Europe, and was a star attraction at Natalie Barney’s rue Jacob garden parties, riding naked on a white horse. Soon after the start of the war, she attracted the attention of different intelligence agencies, which looked to exploit her international network of lovers and clients. Having accepted money from the French ...”

“... Montgomery Wetmore took home Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters, which Lamb’s friend James Kenney had not only borrowed but taken to live with him at Versailles (Lamb had to make a special trip to recover it). The ‘Conant’ who picked up Cavendish’s World’s Olio was probably the philologist Thomas Jefferson Conant. A Louisville china ...”

“... Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I wondered, thinking of Blake’s formative experiences there, whether Carolyn had caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring ...”