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“... In 2002, incoming students at the University of North Carolina were required to read Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations by Michael Sells, a translation into English of 35 of the early suras with a commentary and explication. Three students – one Jewish, two Christian – and a UNC alumna argued, with the support of a number of fundamentalist Christian organisations, that this constituted discrimination against them ...”

“... in the world was ours, but not as a burden or an inheritance, and not in the solemn way in which North American educators claim the Western canon as the track of their own mental history. Borges compares Argentinian writers to the Jews in relation to Western culture, the Irish in relation to English culture: ‘I believe that Argentinians, South Americans in ...”

“... and drinking ‘black lead juice’, an unappetising brew that the biochemist and sinologist Joseph Needham thought was possibly a ‘hot suspension of graphite’, which sounds like a hot toddy made of pencil shavings. Whatever it was, black lead juice apparently made you very ill, but even Zheng didn’t seem to think anyone would make a gunpowder ...”

“... Two months after the suspension of Stormont in 1972, Belfast’s retiring Lord Mayor, Sir Joseph Cairns, delivered a farewell speech in which he reflected on the political situation. Ulster, he said, had been cynically betrayed by Britain’s policies: policies that had relegated it to ‘the status of a Fuzzy Wuzzy colony ...”

“... of anti-Civil Rights protesters onto the plaza outside Boston’s City Hall. His picture shows Joseph Rakes, a white teenager, wielding Old Glory as a spear, lunging forward as if he were about to impale Theodore Landsmark, a well-dressed black attorney who’d had the misfortune to cross paths with the protesters. As Landsmark tries to dodge his ...”

“... for at least half a century. The best-known, or anyway the only one that ever gets mentioned, is Joseph Vance, the first of them, which was published in 1906; the best, or at any rate the most interesting, is Alice-for-Short, which followed, in spite of its great length, only a year later. De Morgan lived to be 88 and wrote seven novels, as well as two more ...”

“... surviving Indian possessions, and later to Mauritius. The others he gifted to his brother Joseph, when Joseph became king of Naples in 1806. Renamed the Royal Africans and briefly commanded by Joseph Hugo, father of Victor, they fought Calabrian guerrillas before joining ...”

“... Though we both came to the offices of the New Yorker nearly every day for 15 years, Joseph Mitchell and I were never introduced and we never introduced ourselves. I seldom saw him; mostly he stayed in his office with the door shut. But I knew who he was, almost from the day I was hired, and over time he came to know who I was too ...”

“... Scotland’s regions. The Hudson’s Bay Company was staffed by Orcadians; its Canadian rival, the North West Company, was run by Highlanders; the sugar plantations of Jamaica were packed with younger sons of Argyllshire lairds; the great trading houses of South-East Asia were mostly family businesses from Aberdeen and ...”

“... with) a female farmer who sports a mannish shirt and tie. He feels more comfortable with three North Country boys, amiably dim, making no demands, and with the building workers who suggest he should become their tea boy. It is better to work out of doors, on building sites, than in a factory, they suggest. The idea of being a tea-boy crops up again in the ...”

“... Going to the beach – by train on the new railways – swiftly became fashionable in Europe and North America. Piers were an addition to beach resorts of the 1850s and 1860s; at first they were landing jetties for towns that had no harbour, but became an entity in their own right. Brighton had several, and became the epitome of the beach. ‘You hear ...”

“... and he would have survived essentially unscathed. This was the Grand Guignol stage on which Joseph Lister – the subject of Lindsey Fitzharris’s agreeably grisly and fastidiously detailed book The Butchering Art – took his place. Born into a Quaker family, Lister was tall, handsome and abstemious. He stammered and was prone to ...”

“... of England’s own ancien régime. Mount Henneth’s satirical reflections on warmongering in North America show his sympathies to have been wholly with the colonists, curtly informed by the colonial power that no more is demanded of them than ‘implicit obedience – unconditional submission – and your money’. Nor was the satire he directed at the ...”

“... play with. The designations are approximate and subject to change, but for now they go like this: North-South is the axis of simplicity; East-West that of pleasure. The North is spare, the South proliferative; the West bland, the East astringent … Well, for something so simple and seemingly arbitrary, there is probably ...”

“... fate is here dismissed in a sentence: ‘the great invasion fleet … foundered uselessly in the North Sea.’ No mention of Drake and the fireships, let alone the bowls on Plymouth Hoe. Nor is there a word about the further Armadas that Philip sent against England in 1596 and 1597, nor about Drake’s disastrous counter-Armada to La Coruña in 1589, which ...”