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“... compiled from four ebook novellas by Luke Jennings of the Observer, is called Codename Villanelle (John Murray, £7.99). Eve is going to become a target. But it’s nice to know that neither of the main women will die before the end of the first episode. It’s the men who are collateral damage, or might be: the men Villanelle is instructed to kill (by a ...”

“... his apprenticeship without mishap in 1761. By 1767 he was in partnership with another bookseller, John Payne, in premises in Paternoster-row by St Paul’s Churchyard, ‘the centre of bookselling’, and he was to settle in the capital for the rest of his life. The profession of bookseller was at that time a capacious one. Johnson not only sold books but ...”

“... European destiny eclipsed its outmoded scientific speculations. The astronomer and mathematician John Herschel was more in tune with the spirit of the age: his Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831) was intended to complement Henry Brougham’s programme for scientific advancement. Its aim was to teach the scientific method ...”

“... public scandal is infinite.’ ‘By the common consent of all London’, Byron’s close friend John Cam Hobhouse said, Caroline had ‘made a dead set at him’. By the middle of May, Byron realised that he had been reckless; their affair had got out of hand. Besides, he hated scenes, and she could not live without them. In an affectionate letter he told ...”

“... to join Curtis Brown, the agents. Small publishing is a risky undertaking at best. I remember John Lehmann’s warning: ‘You sit there listening to the rats under the floorboards.’ As a sailor, I would prefer to say that storm cones were for ever up. But we had our satisfactions. Some of our books are still in print, notably Rex Warner’s volumes of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... There is,’ John Lord Campbell observed in his multi-volume, Mid-Victorian Lives of the Lord Chancellors, ‘no office in the history of any nation that has been filled with such a long succession of distinguished and interesting men as the office of Lord Chancellor.’ A roll-call which included such illustrious history-makers as Wolsey, More, Bacon and Clarendon lent some credence to Campbell’s hyperbole ...”

“... one of the supposed critical moments was the 16th-century Reformation, which is where Alexander Murray’s Suicide in the Middle Ages comes in. The present descriptive volume is the first of an opus tripartitum. Here Murray offers the corpus of evidence, both narrative and legal, for the five hundred or more medieval ...”

“... and drifted into the writing of guidebooks for the expanding railway age. His first publisher was John Murray the third, who wanted an anonymous Handbook on Berks, Bucks and Oxfordshire and insisted on facts, not fancies. Hare regretfully accepted this limitation. Much of his early travelling was done with Maria, by now a prey to hysterical trances. When ...”

“... the most famous German classicist of his generation, on a visit to Oxford in 1908. Now Oswyn Murray, who retired twenty years ago after a long career teaching ancient history at Oxford, has produced a collection of historiographic essays also dedicated dis manibus, to the spirits of the departed.Murray, who turned 87 ...”

“... acutely aware of their linguistic distinctiveness, signalled in the first edition of the Rev. John Jamieson’s influential Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, published in 1808-09. Carlyle, the sage of Craigenputtock, had not stayed there, but in literary London he retained and exploited his outsider’s sense of his own alien speech and ...”

“... John Turturro​ ’s Fading Gigolo is a delicate movie about indelicate matters. No, wait, perhaps it’s an indelicate movie about delicate matters. The uncertainty does the film no harm but it seems to have prompted critics to simplify their doubts and decide they have seen it all before. It’s true the film owes a lot to Woody Allen, and not just because he has a major acting part in it ...”

“... which to fashion it lie ready to hand with the completion of the text of the Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. Now that we have Volumes XI and XII, dealing with his more technical activities as an economist, only the index volume remains to be published, as the coping stone of a notable editorial enterprise. It is very gratifying that Sir Austin ...”

“... as well as her ingenuousness are revealed by the fact that she went first to Byron’s publisher, John Murray, who treated her with ‘much rudeness’. It was Joseph Stockdale, the Methodist pornographer of Covent Garden, who finally took the book on. Frances Wilson’s account of the scandal that followed publication is the best part of her book. The ...”

“... fare. It was true that Don Juan was little understood ‘just now’. His once loyal publisher, John Murray, had backed out after the first five cantos, and the leading periodicals of the time refused on principle to review any of its instalments. (‘We knew not any severity of criticism which could reach the faults or purify the taste of Don ...”