“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”