“... back to its distracted viewers. Joke-blowers filled the ozone: Milton Berle, George Gobel, Donald O’Connor, Jack Carter, Ernie Kovacs, Red Skelton. In this soporific landscape, Caesar’s brand of intelligent laughter – satirical, sketch-driven, character-based, artful – stood out like a good deed in a naughty world. It was ‘like seeing a new ...”

“... to Maud Gonne, and then became involved with her daughter Iseult, to whom he also proposed. Joseph Hone writes about this in his authorised biography of the poet, published in 1942. When Iseult finally rejected him in the summer of 1917, he decided to propose to a young Englishwoman, Georgie Hyde-Lees. He wrote to Lady Gregory: ‘I certainly feel very ...”

“... he has to portray Hunt as the lone and pioneering John the Baptist, preparing the way for Feargus O’Connor, with Chartism as ‘his true memorial’. In reality, liberalism in the 1820s and later possessed great potential for leftward growth precisely because the gulf between itself and radicalism was always bridgeable, and because its Whig leaders were ...”

“... the rain, and Rome seemed a place not of eternities but of passing trade. Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor entered the restaurant in his civilian uniform of open-necked shirt and windcheater, smiling to the waiters and taking his usual table. I didn’t approach him, but took time to notice the high-spiritedness of his friends, happy to be in the company of ...”

“... Minister for Finance. Plunkett was a wealthy builder who had been made a Papal Count. His son, Joseph, had visited Germany in 1915 to negotiate aid for the Easter Rising, and had been executed for his part in that event. In a by-election in 1917 Count Plunkett had been elected as an abstentionist Sinn Féin MP, and in the election for the Presidency of the ...”

“... over which Shawn kept the tightest of reins. Brennan’s male colleagues, including Addams, Joseph Mitchell and Brendan Gill (all of them her lovers at one time or another), joked that she had served her apprenticeship in hemlines. But it was the ability to spot the difference between ‘beige’ and ‘bone’ at fifty yards that made her a natural ...”

“... Geller’s arm and pointed out of the bus at some distant clouds, shouting: ‘Look! There’s Joseph Stalin in the clouds! What is he doing up there?’ He had the bus stop, and ran into the desert. ‘Oh my God, Larry, follow me!’ Elvis was babbling, tears running down his face. He grabbed Geller, hugged him and said: ‘You’re right: you told me the ...”

“... to be cited exactly rather than tidied up. On one occasion this is to honour incoherence, when Dr Joseph Sonnabend struggles to express his feelings: I’m very sad, for example, sad – I don’t know, I can’t find the right word – but if I think of the people in the earliest years, the patients who, or people with Aids, who died horribly, and who ...”

“... enough people to be given hagiographic treatments in the 1980s and 1990s by Alzina Stone Dale and Joseph Pearce. More critical studies by Ian Ker and William Oddie have emphasised the links between a life spent joyfully giving no thought to the morrow and the apologetic books, which argue that only Christian belief can supply a maximum of wonder at this ...”

“... the ‘“surprising point of view” trick’ also has a long pre-Jamesian history. To quote Joseph Addison’s ‘Adventures of a Shilling’ (1710), ‘I was born on the side of a mountain, near a little village of Peru, and made a voyage to England in an ingot, under the convoy of Sir Francis Drake’; the shilling’s later adventures include being ...”

“... and the future art critic Michael Fried, were Jews. His dissertation and first book were about Joseph Conrad’s explorations of ambiguity and double identities. As Timothy Brennan writes in Places of Mind, Said was ‘a photo negative of his Jewish counterparts’.Said spent his first years at Columbia as a kind of an Arab Marrano, or crypto ...”

“... eventually pulled into a Days Inn near Birmingham, Alabama. Terry looked up. ‘This is where Bull O’Connor, the police chief, turned his damn German shepherds on those little black girls,’ he said. ‘Then he turned a fire hose on those poor fuckers who were marching.’ ‘Cool,’ said Sam, parking the truck with one hand. As the woman at the Days Inn ...”

“... say he seemed numb. Two of the people on his floor mentioned to me by Hamid – Sheila, 84, and Joseph Daniels, an Indian air force veteran, 69 – didn’t make it to the stairs. Several people said they thought the firefighters had gone in to get them.Those coming from the 16th floor passed Sabah Abdullah, 72, and his wife, Khadija Khalloufi, who worked ...”