“... give away a million boys’ lives in blood and pain’. Senators from Idaho, Montana and North Dakota called for her to be investigated as a ‘British agent’. How else to explain her comment, during the Battle of Britain, that if ‘democracy perishes in Britain, it will not be because the British people did not fight Hitler with all they had; it ...”

“... near the UN building and Ralph Bunche public schools dotted across the land – including one just north of Manhattan’s Morningside Park, four blocks from my office. But Bunche is no longer a household name, and while the children entering that school can surely tell you something about Martin Luther King Jr, and probably about Malcolm X too, I wonder what ...”

“... the population answered the call of the muezzin. Far away to the west, Sindh, Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier were overwhelmingly Muslim. But, conquered late by Britain, they were a rural backwater dominated by local notables who did not speak Urdu and felt no allegiance to the League, which had scarcely any organisational presence in them. In two of ...”

“... Frend, George Dyer, John Thelwall, Basil Montagu, John Tweddell, Felix Vaughan, James Losh, Joseph Fawcett. Roe’s research has been strenuous, his attention to detail earnest, and his book will be useful. But it will not be quite as useful as the book which he intended to write, which would have brought poetic text and historical context into dialogue ...”

“... state in neighbouring South Kasai. While Tshombe and Kalonji maintained cordial relations with Joseph Kasavubu’s national government, they resented the leftist prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, an outspoken critic of Belgian neocolonialism. The Katanga and South Kasai secessions – referred to by Western media as ‘the Congo Crisis’ – were funded by ...”

“... In the first book I wrote, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, published more than thirty years ago, and then in an essay called ‘Reflections on Exile’ that appeared in 1984, I used Conrad as an example of someone whose life and work seemed to typify the fate of the wanderer who becomes an accomplished writer in an acquired language, but can never shake off his sense of alienation from his new – that is, acquired – and, in Conrad’s rather special case, admired home ...”

“... to carry important meaning in Doctorow’s narratives; in Loon Lake the vagrant hero was given Joseph Conrad’s Polish name; in the more autobiographical World’s Fair the author’s own name was used. Here the hero-narrator is called Billy Bathgate. The allusion is not to the unlovely Scottish mining town but to Bathgate Avenue in Doctorow’s native ...”

“... them. Among the best of his lesser wits is Agnes, estranged wife of the Anglican educationalist Joseph Bell. She persecuted her husband ingeniously by endorsing her letters to him on the outside with jokes about his meanness, and bombarded likely tradesmen with uncovenanted warnings, such as her advice to Bell’s landlord to ‘look sharp’ about the ...”

“... with that of the guerrillas who lived among them between 1971 and 1979’. Dande lies in the far north-east of Zimbabwe, in the Zambezi Valley: a remorseless 90 or 100 degrees in summer before the rains come, if they come ... The soils are poor. Tsetse fly make it impossible to keep cattle to pull ploughs. There are few shops, few schools, no beer halls, no ...”

“... Apprentice. In a series of transformations Lockhart’s Scott becomes both the Wizard of the North and the rich Laird of Abbotsford, graced with titles (baronet and sheriff), broad acres and his own baronial hall. Success is the central theme of John Sutherland’s book too. But step by step he unwraps Lockhart’s packaging, beginning with the ...”

“... became increasingly unsure whether he’d taken his sabbatical in Palm Springs or up on the bleak, north Norfolk coast. Some edge of the golf course, out of season resort like Sheringham – where Patrick Hamilton dried out, on a regimen of no booze before lunchtime, Hopalong Cassidy novels, and the occasional glimpse from behind net curtains of schoolgirls on ...”

“... the superstitious, gullible Firm have faith in. One problem, which the Sunday eugenicist Keith Joseph would readily have identified, was that many young, ill-educated women were breeding indiscriminately, so ‘weakening the race’. This was not restricted to sump-estate CDs with Croydon facelifts; it equally affected the ill-educated from aristocratic or ...”

“... papers and a new wife, Lescha Gordin, in 1905, and from there went to Canada, then Chicago. In North America, Abraham Bellow was variously a dealer in wood and a bootlegger. He had four children. By the time they reached Chicago, Maury felt the urgent need to escape from the family – into American selfhood, and away from any old-world orthodoxy. ‘Being ...”

“... them?’ Bed manufacturers and businessmen, mostly. Stephen Battye, a local businessman, turned Joseph Newsome’s redbrick mill into the classy Redbrick Mill ‘lifestyle’ (i.e. shopping) complex, sold flats in the former Dewsbury Infirmary to locals for £150,000 each, then sold all the luxury flats in Oldroyd’s Spinkwell Mills, now Sprinkwell Mills ...”