“... On 16 August 1960, a US air force captain called Joseph Kittinger stepped out of a balloon. The balloon was 102,800 feet above the Earth. It would be an exaggeration to say that Kittinger jumped out of a balloon in space, as he’s sometimes said to have done, but there’s no denying that his jump was, in layman’s terms, seriously freaking high ...”

“... country is in the shape it is in today. ‘The balance of our human stock is threatened,’ Keith Joseph famously said in a speech in Birmingham in 1975. ‘A high and rising proportion of children are being born to the mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and bring them up.’ The remark is generally held to have cost him his chances of ...”

“... George’s closest analogue among European sovereigns was probably the Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph. As king-emperor, George took part in activities designed to encourage all his peoples to assist in the war, regardless of race or religion. He inspected the wounded Indian troops who were being treated at Brighton Pavilion and in July 1917 addressed Black ...”

“... insurrection against the regime. How unpopular was Castro anyway? I mentioned a series written by Joseph Newman, who had just visited Cuba for the New York Herald Tribune, citing a piece which reported the strength of sentiment behind Castro. Kennedy said quickly: ‘That must have been the fourth piece – I missed it. Could you get it for me?’ I sent it ...”

“... Laski (Briggs’s favourite), R.H. Tawney, Denis Brogan, Eileen Power and her Cambridge husband, Michael Postan. Briggs began to read Marx and the new subject of sociology. He was drifting leftwards, remarking (after the Soviet Union had joined the Allies) that a talk on the USSR by the socialist barrister D.N. Pritt was ‘a very good antidote to rotten USA ...”

“... far from it, his international reputation was steadily growing – but in accordance with Joseph II’s draconian brand of rationalism: as well as banning corsets, bell-ringing in thunderstorms and the making of honey cakes, the Emperor had strictly enlightened views on how to economise on and sanitise burial of Vienna’s dead. In spite of this new ...”

“... army had retreated in 1914, during the Great War against the Austrians and their emperor, Franz Joseph. These two lost souls among a multitude would never find their army, for it had disappeared in demoralised chaos. I got away without many pains, that time at least, and came back on the end of a parachute some two years later to witness the making of the ...”

“... to be the person who inspired the slogan of Occupy Wall Street: ‘We are the 99 per cent.’ Joseph Stiglitz thinks it might be him, on the back of an article he wrote for Vanity Fair in 2011 entitled: ‘Of the 1 per cent, by the 1 per cent, for the 1 per cent.’ Others think it was the economist Emmanuel Saez, who helped popularise the idea that 99 ...”

“... really – come to mind. One is a courtroom in Uganda, when it was still a British protectorate. Joseph Kiwanuka, a battered but irrepressible editor, was being tried yet again for ‘criminal libel’ – the favourite charge used by the colonial authorities to deal with seditious newspapers. As the hearing concluded, the judge walked across to the ...”

“... other three – the barely tolerated ones – were Golo, born in 1909, Monika, born in 1910, and Michael, born in 1919. Erika remembered a time during the shortages of the First World War when food had to be divided but there was one fig left over. ‘What did my father do? He gave this fig just to me alone . . . the other three children stared in ...”

“... up like Lincoln instead. In his diary entry for 12 April 1945, the former Ambassador to the USSR, Joseph Davies, called Roosevelt ‘the greatest and most costly of war casualties’, ‘the martyred leader of the democratic forces of the world, who actually gave his life for the cause’. Having presided over shared sacrifice, Roosevelt and Lincoln embodied ...”

“... my impression of their radicalism is that it is fairly tongue-in-check. Cases in point are John Joseph Stockdale and ‘Baron’ Renton Nicholson. Dr McCalman touches only on the latter, but he promises a sequel to Radical Underworld, to deal with the Victorian period: this, to judge by his present achievement, will be a study of quite exceptional ...”

“... 19th is anomalous. The analysis of his sexual powers that the American journalist and editor Joseph Lyman was given by a New York phrenologist in 1865 (an extraordinary document) surely – like the horoscopes in our modern press – trades on self-doubt in the subject, and peddles reassurance (and starts off, incidentally, with a sentence in the best ...”

“... in the Sligo area, where he lives. With writers such as Eugene McCabe, Tom McIntyre and Michael Harding he shares a commitment to local territories of the imagination and their distinct idioms, giving us access to a set of rich dialects and views of the world, on the one hand, and, on the other, setting up a healthy opposition to the Dublin/London ...”

“... themselves, and all these variables may be controlled for effect. There can be art in this, and Michael Fried argues that within Western painting there is a special tradition of realism, stemming at least from Caravaggio (who, he reminds us, painted a Medusa). In such pictures it is not that a shocking effect is due to reality being let in through pictorial ...”