“... to accept their view of Britain’s global role. Their great good fortune was that in 1903 Joseph Chamberlain united the Liberals in opposition to his Tariff Reform scheme, which to Grey was a perfect example of dangerous Tory imperialist froth. It destroyed the principle of free trade in pursuit of a fantasy of imperial consolidation that was at odds ...”

“... up and threw it on the fire. Alex went nevertheless, and at the end of his first year he won the Joseph Black Medal and a prize that provided him with a scholarship for the duration of his course. The trouble with biographies of people known beforehand to have been very successful is that they have a certain quality of inevitability that robs them of all ...”

“... who would be castigated in Death in the Afternoon for writing too much and being unedited. Joseph Fruscione’s Faulkner and Hemingway: Biography of a Literary Rivalry shows the two writers dancing round each other for several decades, making much of their differences and generally vying for supremacy.3 But these American modernists, Fitzgerald ...”

“... nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind – no, sir!’ In tragedy the significance of names tends to bleed out belatedly, as part of a larger process of recognition enacted by both the audience and the ...”

“... level’ to restore competitiveness to Austrian industry on the world market. As finance minister, Joseph Schumpeter, his brilliant and erratic classmate at the University of Vienna, wanted to tackle inflation with a capital levy, which shocked Mises. When the socialist foreign minister, Otto Bauer, another former classmate, put forward a plan for limited ...”

“... of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, Lenin was sceptical: ‘I cannot believe that Franz Joseph and our Nikolashka will give us that pleasure.’    Pleasure: Russia’s revolutionary destinies were now in the hands of a man who thought of the coming First World War as a pleasure. Say what you will about O’Brien, his work has been infused ...”

“... Edison survived to the age of 84 on meals weighing no more than four or five ounces.)Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, and others like them, had made science fashionable, popular and hugely exciting. Edison and his schoolfellows began experimenting with chemical reactions. At the age of 12, with the help of a friend, he built a half-mile-long telegraph line ...”

“... petulant, from the performance writers make of their art. A chapter which begins momentously with Joseph Conrad, and develops into a meticulous and heartfelt tribute to Stephen Crane, concludes by recommending an old leather portmanteau as the best possible manure for fig trees. Mrs Gwendolen Bishop no doubt astonished Holland Park Avenue with the splendour ...”

“... in response to the photographic evidence of abuse handed to his superior officers by Specialist Joseph Darby. Major General Taguba filed his report in early March, six weeks before some of the photos (but only a few) were published. In all the reports reprinted in these books, acronyms constantly distract the reader from any actual agents or victims under ...”

“... black sheep in the ever darkening sex abuse scandal. Now we learn the sickening news that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, nicknamed ‘God’s Rottweiler’ when he was the Church’s enforcer on matters of faith and sin, ignored repeated warnings and looked away in the case of the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, a Wisconsin priest who molested as many as 200 deaf ...”

“... McGuinness’s Other People’s Countries; the half-Nigerian, half-Ghanaian novelist Taiye Selasi; Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, which makes acute distinctions between the privileged economic migration of the Dutch banker who narrates the novel, and the much less privileged immigration of the Trinidadian trickster who is the book’s tragic hero; the work ...”

“... on, but then skirts. The historical novel – if we except its one great precursor, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas – is a product of romantic nationalism. This is as true of Tolstoy as it is of Scott, Cooper, Manzoni, Galdós, Jókai, Sienkiewicz or so many others. The original matrix of this nationalism was the European reaction against Napoleonic ...”

“... be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats. 19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it as a child at a cinema in Guildford. Then its particular interest was that the village scenes featuring the local doctor ...”

“... Like Harman, Graner was a keen amateur photojournalist. At one point he shows an MP colleague, Joseph Darby, a picture of an inmate, naked apart from a bag over his head, sitting in a puddle. Graner tells Darby: ‘The Christian in me knows it’s wrong, but the corrections officer in me can’t help but love to make a grown man piss himself.’ However ...”

“... 1591), Spenser’s ‘Visions of Petrarch’ in Complaints (1591), Samuel Daniel’s Delia (1592), Michael Drayton’s Idea’s Mirror (1594) and Robert Tofte’s Laura (1597). Tofte is included for his title, but also as a representative of the many inferior warblers troubling the presses at this time. The glut of sweetmeats provoked a predictable backlash of ...”