“... Historians’ estimates range from 37 per cent (Jonathan Riley-Smith) to as high as 75 per cent (John France), with illness and starvation causing more deaths than combat. Women faced the additional hazard of pregnancy, which could be life-threatening at the best of times, and, like men, they could be taken captive. Despite the romance figure of the female ...”

“... Speaking​ of his remarkable version of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, John Ashbery said: ‘I myself try to be very literal, and I frequently use cognates even when they might sound a little strange in English.’ ‘Are there times when that doesn’t work?’ his interviewer, Claude Peck, asked. Ashbery replied without hesitation: ‘Oh sure, on every page, many times ...”

“... Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and its sequels than it does to its Caribbean ancestry. John Blair isn’t overly preoccupied with definitions, though he is keen to make clear that the modern vampire is only one element in a pan-historical complex of beliefs. Etymology can be valuable however when tracing the transmission of beliefs between ...”

“... had unsavoury friends. His nickname in high school was ‘Gangster’, mostly because he was from north Jersey and we had gangster neighbours. ‘Gangster from Gangsterland’, they’d tease him. But he also carried the tag because he was tough and found his way into all kinds of fights when you’d never have guessed there was any fighting to be done. He ...”

“... shifted to the colonies. It was here, especially in Indochina, Black Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, that the SDECE found its true focus and built up formidable networks. Nonetheless, there were a fair number of Clouseau-like disasters. In 1949 it was learnt with horror that the Communist Vietminh radio was broadcasting verbatim the secret report ...”

“... concludes his introduction to All What Jazz (1970), a collection of mainly unimpressed reviews of John Coltrane, Miles Davis et al that initially appeared in the Telegraph. ‘Sometimes I imagine them,’ he muses of the readers of his monthly column,sullen fleshy inarticulate men, stockbrokers, sellers of goods, living in thirty-year-old detached houses ...”

“... with the publication in 2003 of its magisterial sixth volume, written by the general editor, John Baker, and covering the years 1483-1558. It then went back to the beginning, with R.H. Helmholz’s opening volume on early canon law. The rest was silence, until in 2010 the series sailed suddenly and magnificently into port without any of the remaining ...”

“... a Bothy Nicht at the Imperial Hotel in Aberdeen where he heard the ballad singing and stories of John Strachan, an Aberdeenshire farmer who became one of his most important sources. In ‘Journey to a Kingdom’, an unpublished poem written in 1938, Henderson leaves no doubt that these northern excursions were conscious acts of homecoming. In the summer of ...”

“... in 1885. The Football League, the first in the world, was formed in 1888 by 12 clubs, six from the North-West, six from the Midlands, principally to provide the new professional clubs with regular fixtures, so that they could plan their budgets. That is still the game’s structure today: the leagues are club competitions, and the FA is the overall governing ...”

“... architects is essentially a list (Meades likes lists) of refined barbarians. The pantheon contains John Vanbrugh, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, S.S. Teulon, William Butterfield, Frederick Pilkington, Dominikus and Gottfried Böhm, Claude Parent, Rodney Gordon, Richard Rogers (in his Gothic moods), Zaha Hadid. Sometimes, as with the Communist emulator of the style of ...”

“... circulation and advertising systems for mid-sized newspapers owned by Thomson Reuters throughout North America; and, best of all, pre-internet matchmaking software to be installed in kiosks and used by lonely hearts.A few years after I left Andersen, the company changed its name to Accenture. A commercial dispute had begun between Andersen Consulting and its ...”

“... the fleet, and went to and from their work in fleets of buses and special trains. Many had come north from the Royal Navy’s heartland in Southern England: Chatham, Portsmouth, Devonport. A whole town had been built to accommodate them: Rosyth Garden City. Many if not most of my relations worked at the dockyard – Rosyth was a handy provider of employment ...”

“... do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God’s will. Neo-conservative gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters. The US form of government ...”

“... from the appearance of the new Oxford Middleton. Even as the blurb declares that Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino’s monumental collection is ‘based on the award-winning design of the Oxford Shakespeare’, the binding and dust jacket defiantly proclaim its difference from that distinguished model. The Shakespeare was bound in the press’s traditional ...”

“... down the steps to catch the first hints of the river and the Crossness Pumping Station, I headed north. My compass was shaken, but my hunch that the Elizabeth Line’s southern terminal would be the portal to a major development rethink was confirmed. The immediate shopping precinct was in mourning. It was shuttered, lost. K’S SPICE AFRICAN EXPRESS was ...”