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“... the 1993 Prize, an actual dispute about contemporary art was staged at the Tate – defending, Michael Craig-Martin, leading light at Goldsmiths’ College; prosecuting, Hilton Kramer, editor of the New Criterion (it’s telling that there was no obvious British champion on this side). It was made a condition that the speakers should not address each ...”

“... For three hours cries of anguish were heard like some vast choir singing a death song.’ Joseph Conrad wrote with a ‘certain bitterness’ shortly after the night of 14-15 April 1912 about the ‘good press’ the story was receiving. The white spaces and big lettering of newspapers had, he thought, ‘an incongruously festive air’, with ‘a ...”

“... there were 120,000 Iraqi troops trained to take over the security of the country; I heard Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat from Delaware, say that the number was closer to 4000; I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘The fact of the matter is that there are 130,200 who have been trained and equipped. That’s a fact. The idea that that number’s wrong is just not ...”

“... of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, Lenin was sceptical: ‘I cannot believe that Franz Joseph and our Nikolashka will give us that pleasure.’    Pleasure: Russia’s revolutionary destinies were now in the hands of a man who thought of the coming First World War as a pleasure. Say what you will about O’Brien, his work has been infused ...”

“... Edison survived to the age of 84 on meals weighing no more than four or five ounces.)Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, and others like them, had made science fashionable, popular and hugely exciting. Edison and his schoolfellows began experimenting with chemical reactions. At the age of 12, with the help of a friend, he built a half-mile-long telegraph line ...”

“... up and threw it on the fire. Alex went nevertheless, and at the end of his first year he won the Joseph Black Medal and a prize that provided him with a scholarship for the duration of his course. The trouble with biographies of people known beforehand to have been very successful is that they have a certain quality of inevitability that robs them of all ...”

“... level’ to restore competitiveness to Austrian industry on the world market. As finance minister, Joseph Schumpeter, his brilliant and erratic classmate at the University of Vienna, wanted to tackle inflation with a capital levy, which shocked Mises. When the socialist foreign minister, Otto Bauer, another former classmate, put forward a plan for limited ...”

“... petulant, from the performance writers make of their art. A chapter which begins momentously with Joseph Conrad, and develops into a meticulous and heartfelt tribute to Stephen Crane, concludes by recommending an old leather portmanteau as the best possible manure for fig trees. Mrs Gwendolen Bishop no doubt astonished Holland Park Avenue with the splendour ...”

“... who would be castigated in Death in the Afternoon for writing too much and being unedited. Joseph Fruscione’s Faulkner and Hemingway: Biography of a Literary Rivalry shows the two writers dancing round each other for several decades, making much of their differences and generally vying for supremacy.3 But these American modernists, Fitzgerald ...”

“... nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind – no, sir!’ In tragedy the significance of names tends to bleed out belatedly, as part of a larger process of recognition enacted by both the audience and the ...”

“... in response to the photographic evidence of abuse handed to his superior officers by Specialist Joseph Darby. Major General Taguba filed his report in early March, six weeks before some of the photos (but only a few) were published. In all the reports reprinted in these books, acronyms constantly distract the reader from any actual agents or victims under ...”

“... with characters who could slot straight back into the corniest of triple-deckers, such as Joseph Roulin, the indefatigably good-hearted Arles postman with a passion for General Boulanger, or the still more angelically benevolent Johanna Bonger, the sweetie Theo marries in 1889. Its protagonist, though, is larger than anything outside Dostoevsky or ...”

“... to accept their view of Britain’s global role. Their great good fortune was that in 1903 Joseph Chamberlain united the Liberals in opposition to his Tariff Reform scheme, which to Grey was a perfect example of dangerous Tory imperialist froth. It destroyed the principle of free trade in pursuit of a fantasy of imperial consolidation that was at odds ...”

“... black sheep in the ever darkening sex abuse scandal. Now we learn the sickening news that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, nicknamed ‘God’s Rottweiler’ when he was the Church’s enforcer on matters of faith and sin, ignored repeated warnings and looked away in the case of the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, a Wisconsin priest who molested as many as 200 deaf ...”

“... be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats. 19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it as a child at a cinema in Guildford. Then its particular interest was that the village scenes featuring the local doctor ...”