“... and teachers. Not since the publication of the central texts of the modern history of slavery, John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom in 1947 and Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution in 1956, has any serious history book claimed that slavery was a benign paternalistic institution. No one has argued that it was anything other than the great ...”

“... book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), the poem shows Sexton’s craft, honed with advice from John Holmes, W.D. Snodgrass and Robert Lowell. Retrieved at the last moment from her ‘bone pile’ of discards to fill out the book, it had gone through 19 drafts before Sexton achieved what Middlebrook calls the ‘double “I” ’ of the stanza and ...”

“... than the licensed torture of a woman who knew women didn’t need men. By the time of John Badham’s 1979 Dracula, starring Frank Langella as ‘a Dracula of fusion’, the women have become ‘victims no more’, but passionate creatures liberated by his bite – seekers ‘who embrace vampirism as the sole available escape from ...”

“... the more personal and experimental genre of the fancy picture.In a letter to his friend William Jackson, written at the height of his career, Gainsborough complained that he was ‘sick of portraits’, but he seems, nonetheless, to have valued his fancy pictures – these were the works for which he charged the highest prices. And unlike portraits of ...”

“... a monopoly of printing. In 1588 the anti-episcopal Marprelate Tracts (one of whose authors, John Penry, was executed for publishing them) provoked a system of press licensing which survived in one form or another, though with diminishing effect, until the last decade of the 17th century. The first thing that should be said about the current controversy ...”

“... writings and those of contemporary medical men, besides the testimonies of friends and strangers, John Wiltshire examines Johnson as both sufferer and physician (or healer). Hence his punning subtitle. Some of Johnson’s best friends, starting with his godfather, were doctors, and in addition to being himself a monumental patient, he was ready to give others ...”

“... anticlerical French model, was misguided rather than vicious. This distinction was confirmed by John Robison, professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh, in Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe (1797). British Masonry stood in a different relationship to the visible Establishment. Whereas in 1738 Pope Clement XII’s ...”

“... it still Connecticut, the dear deer, the steady lay, the unprivate walls?’ His correspondent, John Hohnsbeen, an art-dealer friend, was having an affair with the architect Philip Johnson, and the ‘unprivate walls’ are those of Johnson’s famous Glass House. Schuyler was 28 and this was his first serious mental breakdown. He had only recently arrived ...”

“... English acquaintance have written brief, anecdotal accounts based on their memories of him – John St John’s To the War with Waugh has 56 pages, Frances Donaldson’s Portrait of a Country Neighbour 118, while those collected in Evelyn Waugh and his World are naturally shorter still. It is true that Alec Waugh ...”

“... distinction; and anyway he might have known from his first surprised (and hostile) response to Jackson Pollock that the future of an art is predictable only by hindsight. His meditations on the characteristics of modernity are more considerable. Writing admiringly about a print by Barnett Newman, he remarks in a parenthesis, ‘I’m no Modernist by ...”

“... rate among medical students – who were liable to let the knife slip – was high: the surgeon John Abernethy concluded his lectures with a resigned ‘God help you all.’ When John Phillips Potter nicked his knuckle anatomising – at the dead man’s request – the circus performer the ‘Gnome Fly’, he swiftly ...”

“... permission to use the runnels and platforms for The Vertical Line, a performance piece devised by John Berger. In Ways of Seeing, Berger presented on television for the first time an ideological analysis of art and aesthetics. One of the programmes juxtaposed pin-ups and centrefolds with Titians, in a powerful early assault on advertising. Thirty years ...”

“... in Boston. He was a state senator at the time in Illinois and running for national office. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, a singularly drab and prevaricating man, had been much taken by Obama after appearing on stage with him in Chicago. Many were taken with him. He was the ‘It’ guy, the papers said so. It isn’t much of a ...”

“... the presidency languished as a series of one-term nonentities succeeded the popular hero Andrew Jackson in the White House. Who could become excited by John Tyler, Millard Fillmore or Franklin Pierce? The Senate chamber, by contrast, was inhabited by giants, notably the ‘great triumvirate’ of ...”

“... will already know that Lincoln has four more years to live before he is shot by Herold’s friend, John Wilkes Booth, the most notorious of all those Americans who have sought to win fame by killing heroes and idols. In this urgent manner, blending the legendary and the humdrum, Gore Vidal introduces his story, like a 20th-century version of a Greek tragedy ...”