“... 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 ...”

“... the delegation, was a geologist famous for pointing out that England was slowly tilting into the North Sea. The novelist and translator Rex Warner had been a left-winger in his youth but was now a comfortably-off, convivial figure. Sir Hugh Casson, who had directed the architecture of the Festival of Britain, was lively-minded, self-critical and immune to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... under other names – whether as Flann O’Brien (‘As a lad I knew Ibsen … Swinburne and Joseph Conrad were also frequent visitors to my grandfather’s place … At dusk, Coleridge would sometimes look in on his way home for a final pipe, and more than once the burly shape of Lord Macaulay was known to grace the gathering’) or Myles na gCopaleen ...”

“... Shall​  we never again talk together in laconic?’ Joseph Addison once wrote to Jonathan Swift, by way of inviting him to dinner the next time he happened to be in London. It’s the kind of invitation that might well appeal to Helen DeWitt, an ardent admirer of 18th-century wits and philosophers, and a classicist whose erudition undoubtedly extends to a familiarity with the defining features of Spartan rhetoric (Laconia is the region of the south-eastern Peloponnese which includes the city of Sparta ...”

“... produced by functionaries of the British Empire – Mungo Park on Central Africa, James Cook and Joseph Banks on the Pacific Islands, William Jones on India – and shared their assumptions about civilisational development. Progress was measured by the extent to which a society exploited its land efficiently, and by the relative predominance of preventive ...”

“... man: a radical mystical Lutheran, a sworn enemy of the Enlightenment, the future Magus of the North.Shortly after Hamann’s return, the frantic Berens attempted to ‘deconvert’ him from his idiosyncratic faith by arranging a now famous meeting at a country inn between the former friends and the young Immanuel Kant. The meeting was a disaster in human ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... housing benefit. For living expenses, she received £112 pounds a week in incapacity benefit. (The Joseph Rowntree Foundation reckons £200 a week, excluding rent, is needed to maintain a decent life.) But last spring, everything changed. The bedroom tax – which effectively fines Quinn for losing her husband – slashes her housing benefit to £97.15 a ...”

“... people.’Somerdale​ had its origins in the chocolate dynasty founded in Bristol in 1753 when Joseph Fry, an apothecary, started selling drinking chocolate from his shop. He bought out a local cocoa manufacturer and the product became popular with the tourists taking the waters at Bath. A century later, the Frys were owners of the largest chocolate ...”

“... 1920 the Soviet Union’s Caucasus Bureau, under the leadership of the commissar of nationalities, Joseph Stalin, made Nagorno-Karabakh an autonomous Soviet oblast. Initially, it was to become part of Armenia, a reward for its early support of Bolshevism. But after an Armenian nationalist uprising the Soviets reversed the decision, and in 1923 Nagorno-Karabakh ...”