“... injected fresh life into the Conservative Party. The central figure in this refurbishment was Joseph Chamberlain, the Birmingham Radical who espoused land reform and municipal socialism. Chamberlain’s proper place in the Conservative pantheon has been a central preoccupation of Nick Timothy’s. In 2012 his pamphlet Our Joe: ...”

“... tricks. Two hundred and fifty years after Michelangelo had earned his living as a freelancer, Joseph Haydn was still the liveried servant of a princely family. The typecasting has fluctuated according to culture, but the most telling example was the attitude in Britain in the 19th century. As the British built their empire, anything that was held to be ...”

“... but diverse answers to the diverse problems that have composed the muddle. The American journalist John Simon has for some years been writing a column in Esquire in which he takes a conservative view of linguistic change in true dinner-party fashion: opposing almost every innovation in contemporary usage, and mixing up several independent considerations in the ...”

“... one Selznick employee thought Margaret Mitchell’s novel ‘ponderous trash’ and that another, John Van Druten, was sacked after calling it ‘a fine book for bellhops’. Well, there must be lots of bellhops. The world sales of the novel now total some ten million; and the film had already grossed $62 million by 1950. Not until the Sixties was it ...”

“... what is Mr Playfair doing writing a book about him? For an answer we may perhaps turn to Professor John Taylor, who has known Fred – or rather a mate of his called Uri – from both sides. Eight years ago Uri Geller – ex-fashion model, conjurer and convicted con-man – hit out television screens with a miraculous display of spoon-bending. The effect on ...”

“... with ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ (Phillips Brooks) and ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’ (John Greenleaf Whittier) as runners-up. Among the works of the canonical English poets, the lines known to most people are probably those beginning Blake’s Milton, ‘And did those feet in ancient time ...’, which Parry set to music and turned into the hymn ...”

“... ten or so of his 17 films, he is, by anybody’s reckoning, flawless. It’s not surprising that John Ford never showed an interest; the ‘manly’ directors with whom Clift did work suspected he was gay, and, in John Huston’s case, tormented him for it. He was neither sardonic nor amused enough for Billy Wilder, but it ...”

“... does not treat the actual life of Welles or its salient circumstances: his collaborations with John Houseman and Joseph Cotten and Michéal Mac Liammóir; his affairs with Dolores Del Rio and Lena Horne, and his marriage to Rita Hayworth; complicated relationships, usually rounded up to some sort of friendship, with the ...”

“... citing the suggestion that for South Africans ‘the rugby scrum was symbolic of the laager,’ John Nauright and Timothy Chandler enter the reservation that ‘such notions can be taken too far.’ Indeed they can. An inward-facing huddle of wagons, their occupants locked in some obscure struggle of their own, would have presented little problem to a ...”

“... to Whitehall, to the sound of ‘such shouting as the oldest man alive never heard the like’. John Evelyn went further: This day, his majesty, Charles II, came to London … with a triumph of above twenty thousand horse and foot, brandishing their swords, and shouting with inexpressible joy; the ways strewn with flowers, the bells ringing, the streets ...”

“... safe from the IRA and IRA fellow travellers. One day in the library I was reading an essay by Joseph Lee in a book called The Irish Parliamentary Tradition. (This title may seem like an elaborate oxymoron, but it was the sort of book published at that time.) The essay was about 1782 and Grattan’s Parliament, an important moment in Irish ...”

“... When the celebrated violinist Joseph Joachim visited Schumann in the asylum at Endenich, near Bonn, in May 1855, he discovered that the composer – by this time in the tertiary stage of syphilis – had been spending his time compiling an alphabetical list of cities. Nearly a year later, Brahms found Schumann doing almost the same thing: ‘I looked again at his reading matter,’ he reported back to Joachim ...”

“... as well as for stigmatism and conversing with birds and animals. Among his imitators was Joseph of Cupertino, a levitating Franciscan friar, easily triggered by prayer, who shrieked loudly before lift-off. St Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, was said to radiate a blinding light as he left the ground. Reformers were not impressed. Since ...”

“... advertisements, and trying to master the finances of printing and distribution. At night he read Joseph Conrad and other classic authors, and after midnight spoke for hours on the telephone with his father about politics, history and the stock markets.’ Once he made it to the big leagues via his adventures with Argus, Black began to expand his portfolio of ...”

“... Independence, all save one or two disagreeable Presidents, together with other famous men such as John Wesley and Columbus, have been posthumously baptised, and there are vast genealogical researches by people who wish to benefit their remote ancestors. The Book of Mormon is not alone among sacred books in claiming to have originated in golden tablets sent ...”