“... question that the Red Army wanted answered above all: had the Japanese, already occupying much of North China, any designs on the far eastern provinces of the Soviet Union? The job of a part-time correspondent, or stringer, for a grain newspaper would open few Japanese doors, so Sorge gamely returned to Germany to pick up more accreditations. He waded through ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... they were not, as a rule, killed there. A cow typically began its life in Texas; was first herded north to the Plains; then herded eastwards (sometimes by rail), often to be better fed and cared for, however briefly, near a major centre of slaughter – almost always Chicago. Unlike the buffaloes, cattle were a marketable commodity. At the same time a ...”

“... there were important outposts in the East Midlands, and a few spots further afield: Wales, even North America. Since the Muggletonians never numbered more than a few hundred, and since 99 per cent of people of their sort did not choose to become Muggletonians, there is not much that social history can make of all this. If there are horizontal questions to ...”

“... Party. She was born Iris Collins in 1949. Her mother was called Mary and her father was called Joseph. He was a demobbed soldier who died, just before her sixth birthday, of a chronic illness contracted on active service in the Far East. Iris, who describes herself as ‘Daddy’s girl’, was, she says, devastated. As the eldest daughter in a family of ...”

“... by then responsible for huge and glossy Hollywood hits like Rebecca, To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest. He was at the end of his contract with Universal, who were either not taken with the subject or disappointed by Hitchcock’s projected style for the film, so he produced it with his own company, Shamley, and filmed it at the Universal lot. In ...”

“... Charles Sackville, Earl of Middlesex, who sent an excited account of the events to his friend Joseph ‘Spanco’ Spence in Oxford, ‘it has been the talk of the Town and the Country and small beer and Bread & Cheese to my friends the Garretteers in Grubstreet for these few days past.’ Jason Kelly, writing for a transatlantic audience, goes to greater ...”

“... put across his brand of reformed, rationalistic Judaism. Books and articles, meanwhile, attacked Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, as the ‘American Mahomet’, picturing him with harem wives, riding camels in the Utah desert. The​ most recent European version of Muhammad is the target of cartoonists whose work is seen as symbolising the value of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as laden with artifice as any other literary convention. Ford Madox Ford, in a passage from Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, brilliantly skewers the claim that a certain prose style – that of realism – faithfully and objectively captures historical events and mental activity: Life does not say to you: in 1914 my next-door neighbour, Mr ...”