“... intellectual (with a high-pitched voice) who became the stormtroopers’ greatest propagandist, Joseph Goebbels. Yet the trial was not completely unfair. Justice Quartus De Wet, who heard the case, had all the normal white South African prejudices, but Joffe believes he was his own man and not a politicians’ puppet. Certainly, De Wet saw right through ...”

“... to Ken Auletta, then of the Daily News, they were ‘a cross between a Marx Brothers movie and a Joseph McCarthy inquiry’.The case brought Sparks in death a level of attention from the prestige press he had never enjoyed while alive. Reporting for the Washington Post, Joyce Wadler got conflicting appraisals of the man. ‘The PLO, as he saw it and told me ...”

“... in Scotland, but probably also to distance himself from an episode of family humiliation: in Joseph Knight v. John Wedderburn, an enslaved man had successfully sued his owner, James Wedderburn’s brother, winning his freedom and forming a precedent that made life difficult for slave owners in Scotland. Andrew Colvile ...”

“... Cook, scientific director of the Grapple test series; some recent disclosures on the part of John Ward, who was employed at the British nuclear weapons laboratory at Aldermaston for six months during 1955; and a group of declassified US documents obtained by Robert Norris of the Natural Resources Defence Council in Washington. It may well be that there ...”

“... three of these who stand out most are Henry Morton Stanley, who explored the route, the novelist Joseph Conrad, and the Irish patriot and human rights activist Roger Casement. It was Casement and a Frenchman living in England, E.D. Morel, who first drew attention to the crimes committed in the Congo in the name of progress and trade. Mario Vargas Llosa wrote ...”

“... for them. As lovers they are inept, incapable of communicating human warmth. Their prototype is John Coetzee, the subject of Summertime (2009), the third in Coetzee’s triptych of ‘autobiographical’ novels. Its metafictional conceit is that Coetzee has died and a biographer, writing about him in the 1970s when he was still making his way as a ...”

“... had a bad stammer, and his puns were delivered with effort, after a period of voiceless struggle. John Clare described him approaching ‘a joke or a pun with an inward sort of utterance ere he can give it speech till his tongue becomes a sort of Packmans strop turning it over and over till at last it comes out wetted as keen as a razor.’ De Quincey ...”

“... contrast to Rousseau, whose ideas can often seem too true to be Swiss). The other, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès from Provence, is not mistrusted outside his native France so much as ignored. Even in France he is more of an intellectual curiosity than an object of reverence. The French Republic has had too many constitutions, too many false gods and too many ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... without exception he is spoken of with affection, or anyway approval. The chief exception is Sir John Hawkins, the author of the first proper biography of Johnson (published in 1787, four years before Boswell’s), and also the man for whom Johnson invented the word ‘unclubbable’ (a nice way of saying he was a crusty old snob who seldom had a good word ...”

“... that of Lillian Ross, who in 1952 wrote Picture, an arresting, intimate account of the making of John Huston’s movie of The Red Badge of Courage.* But Joseph Mitchell was doing a similar thing; John Hersey used something of the method in writing Hiroshima, as did James Agee in Let Us ...”

“... with I.G. Farben and resisting participation in war production). United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis is more villainous than any businessman in No Ordinary Time, and although Doris Kearns Goodwin invokes Eleanor’s sympathy for the miners’ grievances, she treats the wartime mining strikes as Lewis’s personal vendetta against FDR. Brinkley ...”

“... weak introduction to his attack on the present Pope. Of course it is true, as O’Brien says, that John Paul II is an authoritarian and an obscurantist. (It could almost be said that these qualities come with the territory.) It is likewise the case that the Vatican and the Muslim extremists made common cause at the world population conference in Cairo. Yet ...”

“... crisis explicitly in this vein, following Maurice Cowling (The Impact of Hitler, 1975) and John Charmley (Chamberlain and the Lost Peace, 1989). Crowcroft presents himself as a disciple of Cowling and The End Is Nigh is a racier, more simplistic and more emotive version of Cowling’s book. Cowling was less hostile to the revisionists than to the ...”

“... extracts from a video taken from an interview carried out by an eminent neurologist, Professor John Hodges, and presumably taped for research purposes. It’s sanctioned, one imagines, by John Bayley, whose efforts on behalf of his late wife and her reputation make Max Clifford seem timid and retiring. One lesson of this ...”