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“... from the belatedly respectful capitalisation of ‘Board’) in the ensuing footnote; John Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare, is variously Clared and Fitzgibboned all over pages 602-3 with maximum confusion for readers who do not know he was both; and, as Bertie Wooster would say, so the long day wore on, so to speak. Occasionally the text is in flat ...”

“... revolutions, is to reassure yourself that it isn’t feasible. Otherness turns out to be bogus: John Kirkby’s The Capacity and Extent of the Human Understanding (1745) presents us with a noble savage on his paradisal island who has figured out more or less the whole of English 18th-century religion almost down to country parsonages, simply by attentively ...”

“... On a typical day​ , John Henry Salter would rise to shoot wildfowl at dawn. A GP in the Essex village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy for 65 years (he died in 1932, aged 91, while still working as the local doctor), he ministered to his patients in the morning, tended his dogs and plants in the afternoon, gave his evenings to committees, and seldom went to bed without completing his diary ...”

“... of God, as well as a history of our self-conceptions, of our utopias and terrors, and this is what John Casey provides. Casey is in many ways an ideal guide. He is bracingly conservative about the writing of cultural history, meaning that he likes texts, and chronology, and evidence. He has taught English at Cambridge for many years, and his book has about it ...”

“... him to be disturbed by conflicting allegiances in a way which is not foreign to readers of, say, John le Carré’s stories. Picking up such parallels is one pleasure. A deeper reason for the effectiveness of the books is the escape they offer from present anxiety into past discomfort. When Aubrey sets sail for the East Indies with the British envoy, Edward ...”

“... of Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs, including, a few weeks ago, our current island governor John Major. The BBC’s (by now rather crowded) island retreat both affirms and denies the insular character of Britain itself: once there, you would have the advantages of an island without the British climate and the rest of the British people. The Prime ...”

“... takes the tale a step further, landing Simple on a remote island – fifty years before Robinson Crusoe – and cutting him off from the world completely. The echoes of Ecclesiastes, a text frequently alluded to in German Baroque literature, are unmistakable: ‘Farewell, world, for in you nothing lasts: tall towers are struck by lightning, mills ...”

“... explain why Fifa have brought in a new ball, just in time for the Fifa World Cup Germany. Paul Robinson shelled out £420 on new balls just before the tournament to get some early practice in, and reports that it swerves more than the familiar ball and will be harder for goalkeepers. That doesn’t mean it’s easier for outfield players, and especially ...”

“... retaining it and FIFA be damned – what is this about ‘Englishness’? It is this question that John Lucas sets himself to answer, in considering the poetry of two centuries. He has one immediate cultural handicap: he cannot refrain from sniping at his own side (the English), as if to provide credentials of fairness. But what he says often seems more ...”

“... irresistibly lucid prose: it seems as if the decisive move was made before he put pen to paper. John Austin borrowed a phrase from Aristotle’s Poetics to describe this effect: ‘events outside the tragedy’. If we want to get off this stage, how are we to do it? The ladder seems to have been kicked away. The parallel argument current today hustles us ...”

“... this a step further by imagining a creature sparked to life from animal bones. Byron’s physician John Polidori (commissioned by John Murray to provide the press at home with scandalous gossip) read aloud the notes he’d taken at lectures by the anatomist William Lawrence, who had been widely attacked for arguing that the ...”

“... Henry James’s story ‘The Pupil’ was partly based on the unsettled childhood of his friend John Singer Sargent, but he might as well have been describing Violet Paget’s youth. It was Mrs Sargent, encountered when Violet was ten, who became the first of a series of surrogate mothers willing to provide the affection and intellectual stimulus that she ...”

“... world of Victorian periodicals. Perhaps his most enduring work in this medium was his critique of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty for its alleged sentimentalism and groundless optimism, a work first published as a series of twenty ‘letters’ to the Pall Mall Gazette and then republished as a book in 1873 under the title Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.The ...”

“... chose either to emphasise or obfuscate that fact. (One masterpiece of dishonest revisionism, John Hall’s translation of 1652, begins He that sits next to thee now and hears Thy charming voyce, to me appears Beauteous as any Deity That rules the skie. How did his pleasing glances dart Sweet languors to my ravish’d heart At the first sight though ...”

“... 1934, only two or three quavering voices were raised in his defence and then were heard no more. John Payne Collier also had a few defenders at the outset of his ordeal, but after his presumed exposure was complete, no one publicly doubted his guilt, or that his purposes in committing his sensational hoax were an unforgivable breach of scholarly ...”