“... Nathaniel Harman, and Katherine Chamberlain, first cousin of Neville and niece of the great Joseph. In later life Elizabeth was told that her father, a serious citizen, never made love the night before a cataract operation. His courtship had been all but shattered by a religious tug-of-war, which led to a nervous breakdown: he clung to the mysteries of ...”

“... Joseph Mitchell, who died on 24 May 1996, was a staff writer on the New Yorker for 58 years and belonged to the band of contributors who made the magazine’s reputation. His special subject was the sea: he shared Herman Melville’s vision of New York as a city of the sea, ‘your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted around by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs ...”

“... Ickes replied, ‘because you won’t talk frankly, even with people who are loyal to you.’ Joseph Persico, whose admiration for FDR, like that of many Americans, is close to hero-worship, treats FDR’s endless deceptions and tricks with indulgence. John Steinbeck, whom FDR once persuaded to do some spying for him in ...”

“... of the material is drawn from the canonical gospels of Matthew and Luke, with Mark behind them and John ignoring them. They offer accounts of the infancy of Jesus that are often quite wildly at odds with one another, but anyone wanting to retell the tale can pick and choose, ignoring conflicts of testimony and adding more if desired. It does not bother many ...”

“... drew his coloured strata directly onto a base map, made in 1794 by his publisher, the cartographer John Cary, before the fifteen sheets were engraved by assist­ants onto copper plates ready for reprinting – a process that took two years. He made several versions of the map during his lifetime, many of which he neither numbered nor named. Some of these ...”

“... carving of Cromwell on horseback, wearing laurels and ‘trampling six nations under foot’, as John Evelyn put it – remained in place. Pepys, who sat on the Navy Board, knew how expensive a replacement would be and hoped that its significance would fade with the memory of the war. In December 1663, however, ‘after it was forgot whose it was, or any ...”

“... settings for so many pantomimes and ballets. The key figures in the 1840s – Richard Dadd, Joseph Noël Paton and Daniel Maclise – were not merely concerned to delight. They contaminated their sweet melodies with grotesque comedy, transformed the domestic and familiar – the bird’s nest and the woodland glade – into the furniture of a rival ...”

“... had been dreamed up forty years before by two French cartographers, Philippe Buache and Joseph Nicolas Delisle – Buache had claimed that his map was ‘supported by every kind of proof . . . except the living testimony of mariners who had made the voyage’. Why enlightened and rational people should have entertained such improbabilities is a ...”

“... the anti-Heath factions. There was Edward Du Cann, who represented swashbuckling capitalism; Keith Joseph, who represented high-minded anti-statism; Geoffrey Howe, who represented disciplined proto-monetarism. But she saw them all off easily. In this she was greatly helped by their obvious lack of leadership qualities. Du Cann was cavalier and ...”

“... Strahan, Thomas Cadell (father and son) and George Robinson in London, and Alexander Kincaid, John Balfour, John Bell and William Creech in Edinburgh, were not ‘mechanicks’ as Strahan once complained, but collaborators in a London-Edinburgh publishing enterprise that put Scotland on the literary map. For ...”

“... adventures and the fact that three of his wives succumbed to ailments that suggested poison. Joseph Boehm, who designed the commemorative coins for the 1887 Jubilee, may – but then again may not – have died in flagrante with Queen Victoria’s ‘bohemian’ daughter Princess Louise. Politicians used smart dress to cover poor morals: ...”

“... style of censorship and another, as prior restraint gave way to prosecution after the fact. Or as Joseph Hone puts it in his enthralling microhistory, in 1695 ‘the current system of pre-publication censorship was replaced by a new one of post-publication censorship.’ For a line of writers from Defoe to Bentham, it wasn’t a change for the better. The ...”

“... back in a tradition descending from 17th-century Anabaptists and Ranters, of Ezra and Isaiah, of John Bunyan, of the New Jerusalem, of watchwords from the walls of Zion, of ancient prophecies, of the Whore of Babylon and the Beast, of the Land of Beulah, of blood on the walls of palaces, lambs entangled in thorns, and of ‘the old vail of the law, under ...”

“... why not suppress what we don’t like? On this question the Oxford moral and legal philosopher Joseph Raz is a distinguished defender of a view that, in its logical structure and basic values, adheres to the tradition of John Stuart Mill. Raz believes that liberal institutions are justified because, for those ...”

“... to offer new information about the evening or the protagonists, though she has some about Joseph Ritchie, a young explorer, who was there too. Rather she pursues, with warmth and energy, the various currents of ideas that ran through the evening’s conversation. The narrative proceeds like good table talk. It digresses, moves between large subjects ...”