“... on land at Crécy (1346, followed by the capture of Calais in 1347), at Poitiers (1356, where King John of France was taken prisoner, and which Sumption reconstructs superbly), and the Black Prince’s final ‘disastrous’ victory at Nájera in Spain (1367). The story also has its decisive turning points in politics and diplomacy, starting with the ...”

“... Godot. Maybe this time he shows up.Yitzhak Laor lives in Tel Aviv. He is the editor of Mita’am. John Mearsheimer The Gaza war is not going to change relations between Israel and the Palestinians in any meaningful way. Instead, the conflict is likely to get worse in the years ahead. Israel will build more settlements and roads in the West Bank and the ...”

“... coming from the good lord King Henry the Third’. On 13 October he was crowned king. The son of John of Gaunt, Edward III’s third son, Henry was certainly Richard’s nearest male heir in 1399; but the seven-year-old Edmund, Earl of March, grandson of Philippa, the daughter of Edward III’s second son, Lionel, had through the female line a senior claim ...”

“... for love. To recover his lost wits, his comrade-in-arms Astolfo travels to the Moon, guided by St John the Evangelist. On the Moon all that is lost on Earth can be found. The favours of princes show up as inflated bellows, ladies’ charms as limed snares; lost wits are stored in individually labelled bottles. There, in a palace by the River Lethe, the Fates ...”

“... At bedtime, tears would gather in his blue-bloodshot eyes as he read his favourite poems to us. John Dowland’s ‘Weep you no more, sad fountains’ was a favourite. Another was Christina Rossetti’s ‘When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me’. Both injunctions not to cry made us cry too, as such injunctions do, the admonishment of the ...”

“... and the Emancipator, H.W. Brands has written a dual biography of Lincoln and the abolitionist John Brown, who in 1859 led a band of 22 men to seize the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in the hope of sparking a slave insurrection. The divergent paths chosen by Brown and Lincoln illuminate a problem as old as civilisation itself – what is a ...”

“... John Stuart Mill​ approved of dissent. In ‘On Liberty’, he argued that vigorous debate improved society and that unconventional behaviour lit the path to freer and more fulfilling lives. He urged the widest tolerance for opinion, speech and even what he charmingly called ‘experiments of living’. Without such pinpricks, he argued, like-minded majorities would grow intolerant and democracies would slide into despotism ...”

“... Yates, D.P. Walker and Peter French. In Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age, John Mebane offers an inclusive, deeply researched overview of the subject. He examines the many component parts of Renaissance occultism. It was, in the spirit of the time, a recovery of ancient sources. Its philosophical base was Neoplatonic and ...”

“... and glorious’. He leapt like Marcus Curtius into the gulf, taking with him, according to John Barrell, the whole moribund tradition of High Art. Haydon’s status as one of the few literal martyrs to critical theory makes him an appropriate, if somewhat ominous subject for Painting and the Politics of Culture. Here the questions raised implicitly in ...”

“... moment of his election to Parliament to the eventual achievement of his goal. One wonders whether John Major ever heard a similar message click-clacking from railway carriage wheels in the course of his extraordinary non-stop journey up the same greasy pole. There was scarcely time for him to form expectations during the interval that ran from his original ...”

“... victim would go to the wall. In the summer, the Bank of England tried a last rescue operation. Sir John Cuckney, a ‘trouble-shooter’ from the City, was ‘put in’ as chairman to try to sort out the mess. He discovered before too long that there was an alternative to bankruptcy and receivership. The vast American conglomerate United Technologies, and its ...”

“... of enthusiasm of the annus mirabilis, 1650, with its heresiarchs, prophets and messiahs, with John Robins and Thomas Tany, with its ‘witchcraft fits’ and speaking with tongues, provided the odium of example which sobriety needed. Davis has therefore written a book which is silly and unnecessary. No one has ever pretended that the Ranters were ...”

“... and the narrator run a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister; both are married to a man called John). The book is a composite creature: part memoir, part criticism, part fiction, part feminist tract or call to arms or self-help manual or biography or work of literary history. Perhaps the best clue to what she’s doing comes when the narrator considers ...”

“... He is a real person. I met him once and talked with him. He was amiable and decent, or distant.John Bleasdale’s The Magic Hours is both a monument to unstoppable research and, in the end, an admission that even such a thorough inquiry can remain inconclusive. Bleasdale hasn’t been able to talk to Malick, or to his family. But he has interviewed some of ...”

“... When, in 1682, the Reverend Mr Busby, headmaster of Westminster School, expelled or suspended John Dryden’s son, the poet wrote him an excellent letter. Busby had already been at Westminster for more than forty years: he was that terrifying thing, a Great Headmaster. Moreover, Dryden had himself been among his pupils and knew well enough what tricks the old autocrat could get up to ...”