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“... Kungsholm, pride of neutral Sweden, was sold in mid-war to America, converted to trooping as the John Ericsson, then sold back after the war to her original owners. In a burst of postwar activity, before the jet age took over, the Americans made the running on the Atlantic. In 1952 the United States, ‘long believed … fast enough to exceed the US highway ...”

“... near-homophonous Alistair MacNeill; two of his screenplays had already been turned into novels by John Denis; and a third screenplay is undergoing similar treatment by Simon Gandolfi. In this curious world there are occasional legal hiccups. One such, not so much a hiccup as a cardiac arrest, recently befell HarperCollins when they were prosecuted and heavily ...”

“... may occur more frequently than elsewhere.”’ Robin Hood Gardens​ coincided with what John Boughton describes as a ‘golden age of council house building’, but in Municipal Dreams he doesn’t include it in his ‘pantheon’, ‘despite the affection in which it is held by the architectural great and good’. Richard Rogers compared Robin Hood ...”

“... had a crush on. She throws herself on the mercy of a mad, obsessive fan. The minor story concerns John, an evil Coke-monster Hollywood film producer of huge-budget action movies. After a near-death experience with the flu – ‘His heart leapt with the knowledge that it wasn’t drugs or excessive living that had his jaws chattering like a tree full of ...”

“... Britain. Haggard was very proud of an interview he had with a ‘Zulu of high blood’, the Rev. John Dube, who was to become the first leader of the African National Congress. Like his interviewer, Dube was bitter about the injustices which gave whites huge tracts of land and left displaced blacks as homeless squatters condemned to forced labour. The black ...”

“... reconstructed Eddystone lighthouse at Plymouth Hoe in Devon is indeed a monument to its designer, John Smeaton, arguably the first civil engineer in the modern sense, but it does not ‘host’ his remains. Smeaton was an eminently practical man who would have thought such an idea outlandish. When he died in 1792, he was respectably buried in his parish ...”

“... them to adapt to the forest’s ecology. Da Cunha admired his contemporary Frederick Jackson Turner, but his account of the settlement of the Brazilian wilderness seems an intentional inversion of what Turner describes for the western United States in his influential 1893 essay ‘The Significance of the Frontier in ...”

“... The Sweet Smell of Success. I love Malkovich in Les Liaisons dangereuses. I love Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich; I love Adaptation. Brilliant idea! We could write a book about this! We could write a book about writing a book about this! Bad idea …’ In a way, Your Name Here is simply a scrapbook, attesting to an odd, tense friendship, told through ...”

“... in a report for the Council for British Archaeology by Barrie Trinder, Jamie Quartermaine and Rick Turner. The need for a new road between Holyhead and London became apparent with the Act of Union of 1800, which unified the parliaments of Great Britain and Ireland and required the members for Irish constituencies to travel regularly between the two capital ...”

“... he would have seen a writer of rattling good yarns, and a gentleman to boot, in the person of John Buchan appointed Governor-General of Canada, a height to which the creator of She would hardly have dared to ...”

“... at 10 Rillington Place, West London, an address later notorious as the home of the mass murderer John Christie. The same Home Secretary, Maxwell Fyfe, by now a ‘charlatan’ with ‘all the arrogance of the truly ignorant’, contended that there had been no miscarriage of justice and was content to believe that by an odd coincidence two murderers had ...”

“... guests to toss the sweets about, in the manner of latter-day subalterns hurling bread rolls. In John Evelyn’s time the banquet ‘stuff’ was still being flung around the room profusely. Eventually, it seems, sweet-throwing hooligans were weaned onto confetti. Aniseed balls, resembling dark red marbles, were never the epicure’s first choice of ...”

“... at the thought of prolonging his life by an intake of dead man’s flesh? No one who has seen Turner’s seascape Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming In will forget the spectacle of manacled wretches tossed in turbulent waves. (Ruskin seemed indecently carried away by the painterly qualities of this canvas.) It was not only ...”

“... The Inner Circle is written in the first person, unlike Boyle’s earlier book; its narrator is John Milk, a character based closely on Clyde Martin, Kinsey’s first employee at the nascent Institute for Sex Research. According to Paul Gebhard, quoted in Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s biography of Kinsey, Martin was also the last person Kinsey fell in love ...”

“... a sinister beauty and the power to inspire wonder. Botting cannot resist borrowing for an epigraph John Masefield’s tribute to the great sailing ships: ‘They mark our passage as a race of men,/Earth will not see such ships as these again.’ This lively book is a zeppelin history which concentrates on the round-the-world voyage of the Graf Zeppelin in ...”