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“... Their artistic and romantic partnership would last until 1961; the company they kept included John Cage and Merce Cunningham. In this heady atmosphere, Johns chose, in autumn 1954, to destroy all his prior work, and to begin the paintings that made his name when they were shown four years later: flags, targets and numbers crafted in encaustic (pigment ...”

“... the names of Rudolf Slansky, Ehrlich and Alter, Max Schachtman, Andres Nin, Amadeo Bordiga and John Dewey are, still, names with which to puncture an argument, break up a friendship, revise an article or inaugurate a new and daring small magazine. Keywords include ‘Doctors’ Plot’, ‘Deutscherite’, ‘PR Crowd’, ‘Vyshinsky’ and ...”

“... to lead their own lives. When, later, he was one of the five ministers selected to check whether John Profumo was lying about his relationship with Christine Keeler, Macleod distinguished himself by avoiding his colleagues’ ponderous circumlocutions. ‘Look, Jack,’ he said, ‘the basic question is: “Did you fuck her?” ’ Sadly, Profumo continued ...”

“... survived, so many still to come); the post-traumatic shock of being allowed into the showpiece. King’s College, the part the grockles are never allowed to photograph (too squalid, these ranks of distressed vinyl chairs). It’s unreal: all these floaters drifting in from the street, straight past the uniforms, unmolested; an atmosphere of subdued ...”

“... here as he does in the occasional “Charge of the Light Brigade” and the mythic Idylls of the King: by transforming the sacrifices of war into musical offerings.’ If that were really the case, we might come to the point of asking what the point was of reading Tennyson at all. Tucker’s motto might have been taken from Browning’s preface to Sordello ...”

“... In this the Government enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the Nationalist leader at Westminster, John Redmond, who made a dramatic recruiting speech at Wooden-bridge, County Wicklow in September 1914. Despite this, most Irish proved unwilling to die for what they were increasingly unsure was their country. By early 1916, only 48,315 Irishmen (excluding ...”

“... pupils, who included Aldous Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Peter Fleming, John Bayley – a literary macédoine to which several other ingredients could be added. As it fell out, I had myself no dealings with Lyttelton at school, knowing him only by sight. He had the air of being young for his age, a tall, apparently genial beak, well ...”

“... life of fiction’. They see themselves as living in films, like Death Wish fan Bernard Goetz, or John W. Hinckley Jr thinking himself akin to Travis Bickle, the Taxi Driver: here Travis Bickle is the narrator’s son, and Thomson’s chapter on him acutely treats the ambiguous end of Scorsese’s film as a nightmarish, irreversible arrival on the screen ...”

“... published in Colombo in 1900, Sinclair briskly sketches a career that had some parallels with John Clare (an elective Scot when the humour took him). Born in 1832, there was a mean village upbringing; a book-hungry lad leaving school at 12 years of age and commencing his education, ‘such as it was and is’. Sinclair describes a farming family of ...”

“... suggests that the phrase ‘entered the political lexicon’ in 1980 via the Lancashire Tory MP John Lee, who announced that ‘those of us who represent the regions are increasingly aware of the North-South divide, as 21st-century industry is increasingly sucked towards the South-East.’ The phrase first appeared in Hansard a few months earlier, used by ...”

“... black magic or witchcraft. At best, it was evidence of a wicked character. (Kent to Oswald in King Lear: ‘A plague upon your epileptic visage!’) But there has probably never been a worse time in history to have epilepsy than the century beginning around 1850. At that time, a noxious stew of pseudoscientific, Social Darwinist ideas linked the condition ...”

“... chemistry dominate both Holmes’s history and the period itself, but Holmes is interested too in John Herschel, William’s son, who nearly became a lawyer instead of the founder of the Astronomical Society; in Nevil Maskelyne, the astronomer royal at the Greenwich Observatory; in Mungo Park, the African explorer and the first European to reach the Niger; in ...”

“... of his research attacks the familiar claim that heavy internet use makes people more isolated. John Freeman’s polemic The Tyranny of Email cites a study that purports to show how ‘people burned up two hours a day on the internet’ that ‘they would normally spend with family and friends,’ but Watkins finds that young people’s internet use just ...”

“... to suggest that Macbeth, crazed and ambitious as he is, even as he contemplates the killing of his king, can still represent a more ordinary human disarray among matters that are too large, too consequential for us. Alert too to see that Shakespeare represents this case not only dramatically but also through his character’s choice of an individual word. But ...”

“... them. They are rarely loved as much as Shakespeare’s sonnets or the verse of Jonson’s friend John Donne. His plays are a different matter. Among his contemporaries no dramatist other than Shakespeare has overtaken him. The depictions in his comedies of social and economic fantasy, and of their exploitation, have never seemed more pertinent than amid our ...”