“... subjects of his onomastic play (‘afrege’, ‘Grice-told’, ‘eQuine’); the name Alfred North Whitehead is deemed ‘unfortunate’. At one point in Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, a small girl who is asked to identify herself says: ‘My name is Name. My name is my name and the name of the word name and Name, my name.’ The response to this is ...”

“... of emancipated slaves whom they treated, in the main, with disdain and cruelty. The historian Joseph Glatthaar sums up their prevailing attitude with a line spoken by one of Sherman’s soldiers: ‘Fight for the nigger! I’d see ’em in de bottom of a swamp before I’d fight for ’em.’ Whitman’s speaker is less crude than this, but he was clearly ...”

“... was published because it took her a long time to find a voice for fiction: she couldn’t have a North London Jewish one because she’s Liverpudlian, and she couldn’t be Liverpudlian because she’s middle-class, she couldn’t be middle-class because it’s too much like ‘ventriloquism’ and she couldn’t do British-Jewish because the British don’t ...”

“... than Otto Dix, George Grosz or Max Beckmann, let alone the wild men of the 1970s and 1980s such as Joseph Beuys or Anselm Kiefer.It helped that Hitler’s personal distaste for Nolde’s work is well attested. His paintings featured prominently in the exhibition of degenerate art that opened in Munich in July 1937, and from 1941 until the end of the war he was ...”

“... Nazis to ‘co-ordinate’ the media when they came to power in 1933. Reich propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had long condemned what he called ‘the lying Jewish press’, and within a few weeks, the Nazis had closed down the Social Democratic Party’s outlets (it printed more than two hundred newspapers in 1929, with an overall circulation of 1.3 ...”

“... was a provincial, from Figeac in the South-West, whose brains and ambition eventually drew him north, in the best Napoleonic tradition, to Paris and the Collège de France. He was first smitten with ancient Egypt, and the hieroglyphs that gave it so literally graphic a fascination, when he was a small boy. At the age of 11, having moved to Grenoble, he got ...”

“... Queen Victoria’s armpit abscess in 1871 poured pus for days after it was cut open by Joseph Lister. All that is remembered is the carbolic spray getting into her eyes. Rommel’s swollen nose caused him to leave North Africa just before the battle of el Alamein to recuperate. Monty gets all the credit ...”

“... summer 1853, as Clarke guesses, he was walking with Millais on a ‘beautiful moonlit night’ in North London when the young men were astonished by the vision of a ‘young and very beautiful woman dressed in flowing white robes’. She paused for a moment ‘in an attitude of supplication and terror. Then seeming to recollect herself, she suddenly moved on ...”

“... the apothecary James Petiver, the Queen’s botanist Leonard Plukenet and the silk-weaver Joseph Dandridge, whose collections of insects, plants and curiosities were purchased or inherited by Sloane and added to his own stock. Such holdings were easily seen as capital: ‘Sir Hans is ready to promote such designs, wallowing in his own money,’ moaned ...”

“... de Janeiro in 1817 to study and collect the native fauna, he was sponsored by his King: Maximilian Joseph of Bavaria was, Juniper tells us, ‘a bird collector in his own right’ and hoped that Spix ‘would bring him novel and unique prizes’ from the expedition. Rare birds, and especially parrots, had been kept, at least since the Romans, as what we would ...”

“... hers – form the basis of a growing movement that has now spread from Germany to Switzerland and North America. Hildegard of Bingen’s Medicine, written by Gottfried Hertzka, a physician, and his successor Wighard Strehlow, formerly a chemist in the pharmaceutical industry, distils the principles of their ‘Hildegard Practice’, founded about forty years ...”

“... 75th birthday is approaching, and a historic summit is planned between the Führer and President Joseph Kennedy, as nearly twenty years of Cold War between the world’s two superpowers look set to thaw. And then the corpse of Josef Bühler, the one-time state secretary of the General Government, washes up in a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. Xavier ...”

“... I opened the boxes and examined the pieces in the hope of making the games feel less forgotten. Joseph Butler said in a sermon that self-deception promotes our deepest guilt ‘for it is a corruption of the whole moral character in its principle’. Franzen, overwhelmed by his blindness to others’ feelings, now helplessly projects feeling onto ...”

“... of Portmeirion, the hotel he built as a partly cliff-hanging, partly tree-nestled village on a North Wales coastal estuary, adding to it building by building across some fifty years. Always astonishing, some think beautiful, it enjoyed its greatest publicity as the setting for the cult TV series, The Prisoner. But this kind of showy reputation is not ...”

“... on the books he wishes he’d written. The first section is on the Cambridge scholar and scientist Joseph Needham, microbiologist and expert on China, a man who fascinates Steiner and whom he wanted to write about in Frank Kermode’s Modern Masters series, published in the 1970s. Steiner had first seen Needham at a protest meeting against Anglo-American ...”