“... this year all the trade, literary and political figures present at the opening in Budapest travel north on the following day to the coalmining town of Salgotarjan. A crowd has gathered outside the arts centre; there are speeches, poetry, a choir performance and a band playing Country and Western, with Hungarian lyrics. It is raining again, but the crowd is ...”

“... one can suppose, run foul of that opinionated, jealous and vindictive theorist of language, Joseph Stalin. In this country, whatever future lay open for Saussure early on was blighted by the remarks made about him by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards in The Meaning of Meaning, where he is dead and buried by page six, charged with having ‘concocted’ the ...”

“... spoke in an accent of his own devising, a blend of his mother’s Tidewater drawl and an ancient North-East boarding-school dialect; depending on the listener’s predisposition, during his readings he would sound either affected and bratty or elevated, even Orphic, especially when speaking of or for the dead. Although he was one of the most philosophical ...”

“... civilian cars slowed down to watch, and in full view of apartment houses. As the police novelist Joseph Wambaugh put it, this was not brutalisation, it was street theatre. Finally, after at least two minutes of beating, electrocution, kicks and, as he claimed, ‘racial slurs’, King was handcuffed and bundled into a police cruiser. On their way home the ...”

“... confidently say what tone they themselves would have adopted. But even twenty years later, when Joseph Heller’s ‘unedifying tale’ of the Italian campaign, Catch-22, first appeared, the TLS thought it helpful to warn that there is ‘no shadow of nobility’ in Yossarian’s behaviour, as if this were something the author might have wanted to correct ...”

“... meant providing the scenario and captions for silent pictures). Mank’s younger brother, Joseph, followed four years later, also on a Paramount contract, and went on to write and direct movies including A Letter to Three Wives and All about Eve, which won him two Oscars. Mank’s own career wasn’t quite so dazzling, but his work on the screenplay ...”

“... Britain, because it deterred the German surface fleet from further attempts to break out of the North Sea and attack Britain’s Atlantic supply lines. But the German submarine fleet suffered no such inhibitions, wreaking havoc on unescorted merchant ships and bringing Britain to the brink of starvation and defeat. An honest review of the record casts the ...”

“... of captives and shipped them to the English colony of St Helena. Blight cites the historian Joseph Yanielli, who found that Elihu Yale ‘participated in a meeting that ordered a minimum of ten slaves sent on every outbound European ship’; at least 665 slaves were exported in a single month from Fort St George. Yale enforced the quota until the end of ...”

“... through mass destruction from the air was already in place before the first bomb was dropped.’ Joseph Conrad was describing the British naval bombardment of African coastal settlements when, in An Outcast of the Islands (1896), he wrote of ‘the invisible whites’ who ‘dealt death from afar’. In Lindqvist’s history, too, aerial bombardment appears ...”

“... role, rejoicing at American military successes and cast down by British; and when the North ministry tell apart after Yorktown and the Rockinghams could return to power, he took part in imposing the condition that the King ‘must not’ use his veto to forbid a formal recognition a American independence. O’Brien applauds this on two grounds: it ...”

“... of actors ranged anoraked bodies against the pile-drivers. Guggenheims of scholars jumboed in from North America. There was weeping and wailing and the gnashing of clapperboards for the TV cameras. The air thickened with pronouncements about culture, art, our ‘national heritage’.It’s worth reminding ourselves during the present lull in hostilities that a ...”

“... the current business customs of English-speakers, is a cloudy concept; but most authorities follow Joseph Schumpeter in seeing credit creation by, or through, a banking system as its distinctive feature. Historical experience suggests that pioneering, credit-based capitalism is effective on frontiers, before competitors have arrived and whittled profits below ...”

“... Chadwick’s dictum and eventually spurred one of the great feats of Victorian engineering – Joseph Bazalgette’s vast metropolitan sewer system.The germ theory of disease that gained currency in the last decades of the 19th century provided a new vocabulary for talking about the risks of foul water, but new concepts reinforced old sensibilities. In the ...”

“... subject, English perfidy. He accused English soldiers of unprecedented atrocities in Europe, North America and India. He denounced English spies for trying to assassinate his dear friend Maximilien Robespierre (two months later, in Thermidor, the politically nimble Barère voted to condemn Robespierre to death, but that is another story). He called ...”

“... planning, with a particular emphasis on shrinking the extraordinary consumption of the global north via economic restructuring and domestic and international redistribution.Any such plan must envision a rapid and highly co-ordinated global programme of decommissioning. Our current growth-oriented regime has put most of the power and resources in very few ...”