“... in France, and Hitchens tells us that among others who wrote replies to Burke, along with Joseph Priestley and Mary Wollstonecraft, was William Godwin, which he wasn’t. He says that, unlike Paine, Wollstonecraft advocated votes for women, which she didn’t. Paine himself, Hitchens says, was not discouraged from writing Part One of Rights of Man by ...”

“... of a housekeeper from Orange County called Maria Bodine, who had been impregnated by her employer, Joseph Cook, a widower. The trial offers insights into the way a 19th-century abortionist went about her business. Cook started having sex with Bodine a month after she became his housekeeper; she found herself ‘in the family way’, she told the trial, a year ...”

“... On​ 16 March 1944, Joseph Beuys’s dive-bomber crash-landed somewhere in the northern steppeland of Crimea. The pilot, Hans Laurinck, was killed immediately. Beuys, then aged 23, was trapped in the wreckage for some time, before being rescued, so he later claimed, by Turco-Muslim Tatars, nomadic herders living in the area between the German and Russian fronts ...”

“... how the screenwriter describes the whole occasion: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost. Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily. But while he ...”

“... Joseph Conrad died at the age of 67 on 3 August 1924, the day following the 18th birthday of his younger son, John Conrad, the author of the present book. John’s memories, which reach astonishingly far back into his earliest childhood, begin with his family living in poverty in a tiny cottage, ‘a dark and gloomy place’, at Aldington in Kent ...”

“... Is ours a bad age for thinking? To take up the last question first, it is worth noting that John Stuart Mill thought of his own age, which we now view with reverence, as not a strong age for thought. He blamed this largely on the educational methods of his day, which featured cramming and rote learning, and produced what Mill called ‘mere knowledge ...”

“... though he brings these two things together. It’s not only that a packet of biscuits suggests John Buchan’s Hannay. The older tradition is acknowledged to the point of parody when the Prime Minister’s private secretary is given a family set of rooms in Albany where, ‘coming in off the chilly stone staircase, Maxim and Agnes had walked through a time ...”

“... and responsibilities. If there were any doubt about that, the publication of Keane (Michael Joseph, £17.99), the autobiography of the Manchester United player, ghost-written by the footballer-turned-journalist Eamon Dunphy, would clear it up. The book has already been all over the newspapers, for a passage concerning Keane’s feud with Manchester ...”

“... to broach too obviously the ethics of personal responsibility. Had not her ally and mentor Keith Joseph seen his own leadership aspirations shrivel in the aftermath of his notorious Edgbaston speech? When Joseph addressed the Edgbaston Conservative Association at Birmingham’s Grand Hotel on 19 October 1974, the ...”

“... Matthew and Luke, says nothing at all about the Nativity. He begins with the baptism of Jesus by John. The evangelist John, the latest of the four, ignores the Nativity, beginning his book with an extraordinary poetico-theological prologue and getting straight into the ministry. There are extra-canonical gospels that ...”

“... Joseph Gandy (1771-1843) was an architect. More important, he was also a painter of architectural fantasies and reconstructions of historical architecture. These are precisely drawn, dramatically lit, strange, scholarly and elaborate. He wrote many, mainly unpublished and unpublishable pages of speculation about the origin of architectural styles and their relation to man, nature and the gods ...”

“... seem more than slim. In British society at least, even ideologues of the right like Sir Keith Joseph, who argue vehemently for unfettered capitalist enterprise, give predominantly utilitarian (and almost wholly consequentialist) grounds for doing so. It takes an American today to think of unlimited appropriation as a human right. The works considered here ...”

“... 14:51-2), discussed at length by Frank Kermode in The Genesis of Secrecy, and the man Joseph meets in a field at Shechem while he is searching for his brothers (Genesis 37:12-18). These characters should not be seen as interpolations, or as survivals of some earlier and more coherent tale, as is commonly supposed by historical critics. Nor should ...”

“... the French Republic. Just before the arrests, an English medical student studying in Edinburgh, John Edmonds Stock, had been sent down to London by Watt with a letter to the London Corresponding Society inviting them to mount a similar insurrection. Hearing just in time that he was a wanted man, he disappeared, to resurface later in Philadelphia, where he ...”

“... every Corner of the Habitable world.’ George III fostered this programme and in 1773 turned to Joseph Banks for assistance. In the half-century between the end of the Seven Years’ War and Waterloo, the East India Company took control of Moghul India, the Royal Navy began its hydrological survey of the world’s oceans, and Britain seized a string of new ...”