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“... literary achievement. His ‘failure’, if it can be called such, lay in undervaluing his gifts. John Jay Chapman blamed Adams and his fellow ‘dilettanti’ for admiring America too much and despising her too much: ‘They could not help bowing the knee to success, though they did so with a sneer upon their lips.’ The letters bear him out. Adams made ...”

“... The​ evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith believed that his former supervisor J.B.S. Haldane ‘wasn’t an ordinary mortal’. Haldane moved between the fields of physiology, biochemistry, genetics and evolutionary biology, making contributions to each that would ‘satisfy half a dozen ordinary mortals’, and also wrote scientific articles and books aimed at non-specialists ...”

“... Robert and Jon who are on a spree: they steal a yoghurt, a milkshake, two cartons of Ambrosia rice. Finally they steal a child, blond-haired, not quite three. One of them takes him by the hand. They lead him into the city. They walk some busy roads, they are seen many times, remarked by passers-by. At intervals the baby shows distress, and adults do ...”

“... in the dry lands and to allow the endless arid-land agriculture to produce iceberg lettuces and rice and alfalfa and cotton fields, though in some of those places there is hardly enough rainfall to raise an agave plant. The water is heavily subsidised so that farmers – mostly large-scale agribusiness enterprises, not Jeffersonian yeomen – can also ...”

“... at home and for military defeat abroad. In his compelling biographical and historical study of John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, Neil Sheehan focuses our attention on this sorry chapter in American foreign affairs. A prize-winning reporter in Saigon for United Press International and the New York Times, Sheehan also won distinction as the journalist ...”

“... patterns. He pinpoints the birth of traumatic memory to a machine-made disaster, the train crash. John Erichsen was perhaps the first physician to describe the syndrome in the 1860s while examining victims of British railway accidents; he called it ‘railway spine’, and attributed it to vaguely defined neurological mechanisms that originated in dorsal ...”

“... fixed upon me, but they did not interfere with her habit of chewing cloves, flagroot, or grains of rice. If these articles were not at hand, she chewed a small chip. ‘Aunt Merce, poor Hepburn chewed his shoes, when he was at Davis’s Straits.’ ‘Mary, look at that child’s stockings.’ The disjointed speech is a foretaste of Ivy ...”

“... are the ‘birth pangs of a new Middle East’, they are very different from those Condoleezza Rice claimed to discern during Israel’s war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006. The first illusion to crumble was the myth of Egyptian passivity, a myth that had exerted a powerful hold over Egyptians. ‘We’re all just waiting for someone to do the job for ...”

“... deputy headmaster came to the school; you could tell by looking at his hair that he was all brown rice and liberal experiment, so I wrote him a well-spelled note about reversing the method used for the picking of teams. I remember the day and the very hour. ‘O’Hagan,’ the PE assistant said, ‘pick your team.’ I walked the few yards onto the field ...”

“... of the country when ‘sovereignty’ is passed to the Iraqis. A loyal secret police, says John Pike, a military expert in Washington, means ‘the new Iraqi political regime will not stray outside the parameters that the US wants to set.’ It will ‘reign but not rule’. Meanwhile, power will largely remain with what is now called the Coalition ...”

“... gather a false conclusion from these true premises.’ In a work of 1744, The Female Monarchy, John Thorley was as repelled by the idea of the queen bee being an exemplar to women as Warder had been delighted to compare the queen bee to Queen Anne. He abominated the notion then gaining ground that the drones might have sex with the queen. She was ...”

“... tradition, its overdetermined atmosphere of seedy blowsiness is vaguely reminiscent of Archie Rice in Tony Richardson’s film of The Entertainer as well as early Graham Greene. The style is distinctive in the way it wanders in and out of interiority, with private thought and public speech undifferentiated by punctuation or mise-en-page. The central ...”

“... modern jest book, which ascribed jokes and smart sayings to well-known figures such as the poet John Skelton or the fool Richard Tarleton. Jest-book-style anecdotes were often transcribed alongside more serious quotations in manuscript notebooks compiled by individual readers. So in 1601, the lawyer John Manningham ...”

“... lesson and look for new oil partners. Now the Americans are all over Obiang; in 2006, Condoleezza Rice welcomed her ‘good friend’ to Washington, much to the dismay of Obiang’s opponents, who claim that torture is frequently used in Equatorial Guinea. Oil may be wrecking lives in Africa, but according to Shaxson it is equally damaging – possibly more ...”

“... how Stephen Dedalus, disowning his own parent, searches for another father. Portrait of John Stanislaus Joyce by Patrick Tuohy (1923) Just as Oscar Wilde began to become himself the year after his father’s death, when he was 21, and John Butler Yeats managed, figuratively, to kill his son by going into exile in ...”