“... 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 ...”

“... which he sits in for a while, poking the fire, daydreaming. Then he bestirs himself again, presses north towards his bed, the place where ‘for one half of our life’ we forget ‘the sorrows of the other half’. And so on, ‘from the expedition of the Argonauts to the Assembly of Notables, from the lowest depths of hell to the last fixed star beyond the ...”

“... both routes, until the whole project ramifies uncontrollably. The exploitation of the forests of North America is a vast enough subject, but she feels the need to take characters to New Zealand at two historical moments to enrich a record that was already in danger of bursting. She struggles to find a cut-off point, with the first section of the book set in ...”

“... du Pont, son of an adviser to Louis XVI, began manufacturing gunpowder on the Brandywine River, north of Wilmington. His firm became the largest supplier of explosives to the Union during the Civil War and it now ranks fourth among US corporations as a generator of air pollution. Among its innovations are nylon, Teflon, Mylar, Tyvek and Kevlar. It made the ...”

“... he died. Only one thing rescued Fitzgerald’s name from a dismal place between Floyd Dell and Joseph Hergesheimer on the list of forgotten novelists of the 1920s – the novel Perkins called ‘a wonder’. In Careless People, her new book on the writing of The Great Gatsby, Sarah Churchwell proceeds with a sturdy working theory: that it helps to ...”

“... with one another, and held together by little more than panegyric. The Christian kingdoms of the north were equally fragmented and subsisted on raiding the south. In an organised system of extortion, Muslim rulers struck deals with Christian kings and warlords, paying tributes known as parias in exchange for protection. Christian and Muslim rulers were ...”

“... W. Bush repeatedly linked Syria to the three members of his ‘axis of evil’ – Iraq, Iran and North Korea – throughout his presidency. State Department cables made public by WikiLeaks show that the Bush administration tried to destabilise Syria and that these efforts continued into the Obama years. In December 2006, William Roebuck, then in charge of ...”

“... Tunnel Boring Machines that dug her out, prepares for its rendezvous with the admired brickwork of Joseph Bazalgette’s overwhelmed Victorian outflow. Such imaginative solutions were required, at whatever the cost (in the end it was £4.3 billion), to reduce the horror of the raw sewage and indestructible sanitary and convenience products spewing into ...”

“... House, Sydney already had what Australians hoped was a world-famous Bridge, endlessly repainted in North Sea grey, brooding like a Calvinist’s conscience over the city that started off as King George’s Gulag and still struggles to shake off the mighty influence of a minor archipelago on the other side of the world. A glance tells you more than you want to ...”

“... a relatively peaceful life in the small, obsessively erudite academic communities of Protestant north Germany’. For him, history was pragmatic in a sense different from that intended by the ancient writers. ‘In his world of well-ordered police states, charters rested on birth, orders emanated from the top, and birth order often determined the destiny of ...”

“... governor who won the Iowa caucuses in 2008. Huckabee believes ‘that there’s more freedom in North Korea sometimes than there is in the United States,’ because ‘Christian convictions are under attack as never before … We are moving rapidly towards the criminalisation of Christianity.’ He has noted that ‘in the world I come from and choose to ...”

“... not unlike modern research institutes; the most famous of these were at Maragha, in present-day north-eastern Iran, which may even have housed visiting Chinese astronomers, and at Samarqand, which had an underground sextant with a forty-metre radius. Using observations made at Maragha in the 14th century, Ibn al-Shatir produced lunar and planetary ...”

“... from Keynes himself, modern day economists of a reformist disposition, such as Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz, nonetheless reprise the sensibility typical of Keynesianism. Keynes​ was the paradigm, but was he the first Keynesian? Mann’s answer is bold. If Keynesianism is a constructive liberal response to revolution, a response that seeks to ...”

“... now managed by an erratic caucus of Lockhart, Cromie, Reilly and the French ambassador, Joseph Noulens, was in chaos. They had assumed that the British force at Archangel, under General Frederick Poole, would advance south to seize the junction town of Vologda. His march was supposed to be timed to support counter-revolutionary risings in towns ...”

“... by essentially compilatory works, the long lists and catalogues that culminated in the work of Joseph Eckhel, another Austrian and curator of the imperial coin cabinet in Vienna. His Doctrina numorum veterum invented some of the classificatory principles with which we still work, for instance the sequence in which Greek coinages are presented in ...”