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“... 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 ...”

“... put across his brand of reformed, rationalistic Judaism. Books and articles, meanwhile, attacked Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, as the ‘American Mahomet’, picturing him with harem wives, riding camels in the Utah desert. The​ most recent European version of Muhammad is the target of cartoonists whose work is seen as symbolising the value of ...”

“... there were important outposts in the East Midlands, and a few spots further afield: Wales, even North America. Since the Muggletonians never numbered more than a few hundred, and since 99 per cent of people of their sort did not choose to become Muggletonians, there is not much that social history can make of all this. If there are horizontal questions to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... they were not, as a rule, killed there. A cow typically began its life in Texas; was first herded north to the Plains; then herded eastwards (sometimes by rail), often to be better fed and cared for, however briefly, near a major centre of slaughter – almost always Chicago. Unlike the buffaloes, cattle were a marketable commodity. At the same time a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”