“... you know Nick Leeson?’ he asked a man near me. This scene uncannily re-created a passage from Joseph Conrad’s ‘A Personal Record’, with which I was toughing out a bout of in-flight sleeplessness. Upon my word, I heard the mutter of Almayer’s name faintly at midnight ... I don’t mean to say that our passengers dreamed aloud of Almayer, but it is ...”

“... matters have been improving. In 1980, there was even a small surplus, only partly owing to North Sea oil. As for food prices, 90 per cent of the rise since 1973 is due to Western inflation and soaring energy prices. What’s hit the British economy is not Community membership, but world slump. It would be worse outside. So, patiently, the Community’s ...”

“... of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and has written several books, among them Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, and the recent Orientalism in which he analyses ‘the remarkable tradition in the west of enmity towards Islam in particular and the orient in general’. The Palestinians of whom Said writes number between three ...”

“... under my feet then drifted, swole, each bubble’s angle reflecting a diamond nova from both its north and south pole.’ The swole/pole consonance is an alienation effect, immediately drawing attention to the writer’s exertions, and one wonders where exactly Morvern’s lexicology had encountered the Miltonic ‘swole’ or the astronomical precision of ...”

“... tradition? The 18th century has provided most of the candidates. There were opinion formers like Joseph Addison, who airbrushed out Milton’s regicidal politics, or David Garrick, who turned Shakespeare from upstart crow into national bard; there were theoreticians of ‘original composition’ like Edward Young, who set a premium on the rejection of ...”

“... celebrated Micheaux’s successful reinvention and proposed the black settlement of the North-West. Micheaux followed Washington’s bootstraps philosophy and published and distributed The Conquest himself, embarking on an aggressive round of personal appearances in black communities. His second book, The Forged Note: A Romance of the Darker Races ...”

“... control of the means of production by the family unit’. His prime example of the family unit was Joseph, ‘a free and lawful man’ who ‘lived from his own’ (as Belloc did, from freelance writing), supported by his loyal spouse, Mary, and who took on his son, Jesus, as an apprentice in the family carpentry business. The moral society, as imagined by the ...”

“... no surprise that some wealthy people took to rags in order to preserve their riches. The sculptor Joseph Nollekens, who made £200,000 by restoring and faking antiquities for Grand Tourists in Rome, running a black market in smuggled silk stockings and turning out portrait busts for vain celebrities, was a sordid skinflint. Henry Cavendish, who discovered ...”

“... in Wisconsin. There are the Trump supporters, clustered in ‘non-tourist, rural’ areas in the north of the state, like Forest County, and in areas like West Allis, a suburb of Milwaukee and former home of Allis-Chalmers, a tractor and farm machinery manufacturer shuttered in the 1990s, where the grandchildren of Eastern European immigrants are nostalgic ...”

“... a space that very soon became a single compacted block, an uncelebrated curation in the spirit of Joseph Beuys, or Phyllida Barlow’s recent mounds at Tate Britain. The higher they stack the investment silos of target architecture, the more those condemned to live in fallout shadows dig and scrape. A dowser and ley line tracker called Alan Hayday, formerly ...”

“... of their quotas. Leopold’s project had become a scandal, even for staunch imperialists like Joseph Conrad. The transfer of wealth away from the Free State was impressive, as were the rewards for international business and the crown. In The King Incorporated (1963), Neal Ascherson recorded that between 1896 and 1906, Leopold cleared a personal profit in ...”

“... little effect, nonetheless bear repeating. The greenhouse effect was first hypothesised in 1824 by Joseph Fourier – though his analogy was the bell jar rather than the greenhouse – and proved experimentally by John Tyndall in 1859. In the 19th century it could be seen as unambiguously a good thing: if carbon dioxide and other trace gases didn’t trap heat ...”

“... been a lucrative racket controlled by the Camorra, which shipped toxic refuse from the industrial North to illegal dumps in Campania. Both the region and the city of Naples had been fiefs of the centre-left for more than a decade – the governor (and former mayor) ex-PCI, the mayor ex-DC. Under this pair, Antonio Bassolino and Rosa Russo Jervolino (the first ...”

“... immeasurably in the later book. Both have at their centre the tensions between men and women, North and South, Catholic and Protestant, drunkenness and sobriety. Healy is not in any sense a schematic writer, however; he prefers to trust to language and where it might take him. In Fighting with Shadows, it takes him into a kind of turmoil which he cannot ...”

“... via Yeats, Synge, Francis Ledwidge, Padraig Colum and one or two others: no Joyce, James Stephens, Joseph Campbell, F.R. Higgins, Donagh MacDonagh or W.R. Rodgers. It’s hard not to feel that John Montague’s Faber Book of Irish Verse of 1974 offers a rather more satisfactory selection from the middle part of this century. Kinsella is at pains to repudiate ...”