“... books,’ he reports, ‘which in Cambridge at that time meant F.R. Leavis, D.H. Lawrence and Joseph Conrad, whom we both admired.’ Huneeus was much impressed by Nostromo, Conrad’s disheartening novel about political excitement and hopelessness in South America. ‘Good God,’ Huneeus exclaimed. ‘I mean, the man hardly touched land there and yet he ...”

“... inspiration. According to Lloyd George, ‘the map of Europe as we see it today is the map of Joseph Mazzini. He was the prophet of free nationality ... He taught us not merely the rights of a nation; he taught the rights of other nations ... He is the father of the idea of the League of Nations.’ Disillusionment with Versailles, and the revulsion ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the tastes of its royal owners, Queen Mary and King George V. There was a working toilet made by John Bolding and Sons, and a gun room stocked with Purdey shotguns powerful enough to shoot flies. Artists created hundreds of paintings and books for its clubby, masculine library. Harold Nicolson gamely contributed a tiny treatise on ‘The Detail of ...”

“... force). Relatively few people owned a radio, for example, so Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, introduced the People’s Receiver (Volksempfänger), a cheap and cheerful little wireless, with no shortwave so that listeners couldn’t tune in to foreign broadcasts. Fridges were even rarer, so the government introduced the People’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... connoisseurs of disappointment and self-sabotage, published his first novel, Jernigan, in 1991. Joseph Heller called it a ‘sizzler’ and Michiko Kakutani announced in the New York Times that Gates had ‘established himself as a novelist of the very first order’. The Times profiled him too: ‘“Beckett is my main man,” Mr Gates says in his office ...”

“... her fault, poor dear. Twenty years earlier she might have been trading poisoned darts with John Barrymore. But she and her sorority sisters were condemned to representing a girdled, uplifted world whose only edges were in the bones and stitching of their foundation garments. Faced with so much overwhelmingly off-putting evidence, the feminists, and ...”

“... First published in France in 1817, the princess’s prison journal was translated into English by John Wilson Croker in 1823. Croker noted that several passages are obscure, and one or two contradictory: there are frequent repetitions, and a general want of arrangement. All these, which would be defects in a regular history, increase the value of this ...”

“... In the duc’s version Mélusine appeared to the English commander, a grizzled veteran called John Cresswell, in his bedroom, where he was entertaining a lady called Alexandrine. Mélusine frightened him so much that Alexandrine reproached him: ‘How ofte haue I sene your mortal enemyes tofore your presence that neuer ye were aferd, and now for a serpent ...”

“... would be a terrible piece of phrasing even if it didn’t tap into a deep pop-cultural memory of John Travolta’s voice.) Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, one of Cioran’s translators, described her job in the introduction to On the Heights of Despair as equivalent to the experience of Jacob, who wrestled with an angel all night long – ‘the translator ...”

“... the road with the psychologist J.C. Flügel and the philosopher Cyril Joad, and reported back to John O’ London’s Weekly. His Leaves from a Psychist’s Casebook (1933) and Confessions of a Ghost-Hunter (1936) were bestsellers. The BBC frequently broadcast about the supernatural while cultural conservatives also cashed in. In a Britain carved up by ...”

“... League, with the title ‘How Not to Translate Marx’. The translator he had in mind was John Broadhouse, a pseudonym for the journalist Henry Mayers Hyndman, who was notorious both for his socialism and his pronounced antisemitism (he once said of Marx’s daughter Eleanor that she ‘inherited in her nose and mouth the Jewish type from Marx ...”

“... Life of Hu Yaobang and Chen Jian’s of Zhou Enlai, both published in 2024.* We can now add Joseph Torigian’s biography of Xi Zhongxun. Such biographies necessarily intervene in several irresolvable contests. Were these men principled revolutionaries or deviants from the true cause? Why were they always purging one another? Torigian’s intervention ...”

“... home: Philby in Ambala, India, son of the eccentric explorer of Arabia (and Ford motor agent) St John Philby; Sorge in Baku, Russia to a German petroleum engineer and his Russian wife, the daughter of a prosperous capitalist from Kiev. Politically, Sorge’s lineage was even more exotic than Philby’s: while his father was a staunch subject of the ...”