“... the House of Commons in July, ‘that within six months we shall have populous districts in the north in a state of social dissolution.’ Privately, he was even less guarded. ‘The manufacturing classes’, he confided to a newspaper friend, now had, ‘like another Samson, the strength to pull down the entire fabric’. And as Engels settled into his new ...”

“... is about such businesses. In the 1980s, waste became a national export across much of the global North. Since then, firms have made vast amounts of money by sending the rich world’s waste to the global South. At first, the focus of this business was hazardous waste like asbestos or paint sludge. In countries like the US it cost as much as $250 per tonne to ...”

“... Coxey’s army of unemployed in its protest march on Washington. Still not 20, he hoboed all round North America, spent some time in jail and returned to enrol at Berkeley. He dropped out after a semester to dig for gold in the Yukon. He was back in Oakland a year later, broke, scurvy-ridden and – at 21 – determined to be a writer. Within ten years, he was ...”

“... of the beach through which the first gaggle of British colonists looked for the natives who Sir Joseph Banks, urging the settlement, had said would not pose much of a problem. That line, across which black Australia stared back, was a threshold between visibility and invisibility: the Eora could see the First Fleeters, but the First Fleeters, peering into ...”

“... beheld’. The actors were hissed off stage, but Jonson, possessed of what the Renaissance scholar Joseph Loewenstein has called a ‘bibliographic ego’, was not a man to walk away. The printed text of 1631 includes sustained criticism of the audience (Jonson prefers ‘fastidious impertinents’) and a verse with the title ‘The just indignation the author ...”

“... suggests. Consider the case of Philipp Clüver, the Leiden-trained geographer and disciple of Joseph Scaliger who tramped the roads of half of Europe, destroying his health, in order to reconstruct the route of Hannibal’s march. Krebs devotes a short, packed passage to Clüver’s Germania antiqua – a massive work that included two separate editions ...”

“... in mutual incomprehension and loathing, with entirely different campaigns being fought in the North and the South (where for the most part Lincoln wasn’t even on the ballot). Dewey died in the summer of 1952, so the last election he was able to follow all the way through was the one four years earlier, when Harry Truman beat Thomas Dewey (no ...”

“... will be the old age of the government if it is thus early decrepit!’ the French ambassador Joseph Fauchet sniffed in 1792. The ‘whole nation’ is ‘a stock-jobbing, speculating, selfish people. Riches alone here fix consideration.’ Those early American foibles – cash, class and corruption – are at the heart of our present troubles. The most ...”

“... first transcend the boundaries of its geographical origins, adopted by the plains Indians to the north and then, in the late 19th century, starting to attract the interest of pharmaceutical companies and chemists.The trade in peyote beyond its natural habitat is probably as ancient as its use by humans. The buttons were dried in the desert sun and easily ...”

“... mercy of beduin invaders: a situation that lasted well into this century in Arabia and parts of North Africa. For this reason, anthropological studies in these regions can make an important contribution to our understanding, not just of the people who live in remote areas under primitive conditions, but of the central religious tradition that informs their ...”

“... By the 1820s, a fifth or more of the world’s population, in Asia, Australasia, Africa, mainland North America, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean world, were in a position to describe themselves as ‘British subjects’, along with the miscellaneous inhabitants of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and myriad small islands off their coasts. The late ...”

“... reindeer herdsman’s pointed felt cap with earflaps, like a Norman battle helmet reconfigured by Joseph Beuys. It is warm. Kötting’s thick white gypsum facemask is melting. Later, coming into the outskirts of Tunbridge Wells, as a sharp wind from the east begins to bite, he puts on a kneelength transparent rain cape under the jacket of his suit, giving ...”

“... new earl and Tim Knox, reproduces a passage from the journal of an 18th-century traveller called Joseph Pococke, who visited in 1754 and was particularly impressed with the grounds:The gardens are very beautifully laid out, in a serpentine river, pieces of water, lawns, &c, and very gracefully adorn’d with wood. One first comes to an island in which there ...”

“... were among the local Labour MPs who became friends, as did two Tories, Edward Boyle and Keith Joseph (who would phone Briggs in the middle of the night to talk about books). ‘At the time Asa considered himself a socialist and a supporter of the Bevanite wing of the Labour Party. But he was not active in politics and had allowed his membership of the ...”

“... 1850 were christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and ...”