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“... his apprenticeship without mishap in 1761. By 1767 he was in partnership with another bookseller, John Payne, in premises in Paternoster-row by St Paul’s Churchyard, ‘the centre of bookselling’, and he was to settle in the capital for the rest of his life. The profession of bookseller was at that time a capacious one. Johnson not only sold books but ...”

“... He gives short histories of dozens of Bunyan’s contemporaries, noting, for instance, that John Kelyng, the judge who bullied Bunyan in 1661, had done 18 years in prison himself and had ‘grounds for feeling vengeful’; that Paul Cobb, the seemingly feeble Clerk of the Peace who tried to let Bunyan off, went on to become mayor twenty years later when ...”

“... a shadowy underground church loyal to Rome (one of the cardinals named secretly in pectore by Pope John Paul II is thought by many observers to be a prelate of that body). Perhaps an even longer-term result of the Portuguese dominance of the early Jesuit mission is the pinyin system for rendering Chinese characters in the Roman alphabet, with its superscript ...”

“... fictive, prospective or real (floods, kidnappings, automobile accidents, the Beast of St John); fairy tales; shopping malls, hospitals, high street stores, dinner parties, graves. All these places and events can break people, or contain those who are broken. She can even put many of these things in the same poem. ‘Sensual Pleasures’ (another new ...”

“... victims, who kept on being willing no matter how they were treated. Miller cites the case of John McMaster, at one time ‘first Pope of the Church of Scientology’, who later fell into disfavour. McMaster, he says, now speaks of Hubbard with enormous bitterness, always calling him ‘Fatty’. When Hubbard had him thrown overboard one day (only in ...”

“... from creating a financial interest in someone else’s death. Sandel relates the case of Michael Rice, a Walmart employee who collapsed and died while carrying a customer’s new television to her car. The company had insured Rice without his knowledge for $300,000, which Walmart then trousered, giving ...”

“... a plague of Indian and Chinese usurers and traders, the Chinese soon in control of the rice trade. The French made use of them, and they of the French. This could happen because Vietnam, like some Indian provinces but not India as a whole, lacked a strong mercantile class of its own. Why this should have been so, and why urban life had developed so ...”

“... his circle for an attack on Iran. It is generally supposed that Gates, together with Condoleezza Rice, held Cheney off and gave Bush the institutional backing to resist him. Obama by all reports has become friendly with Gates – they share a certain reserve and an image of themselves as temperate and moderate-minded public men. He has shown no such signs ...”

“... haven’t got much of a record of supporting human rights in Africa. Only last year Condoleezza Rice warmly welcomed the leader of Equatorial Guinea, a petrostate where the security forces reportedly gang-rape prisoners and the elite squirrels money away in Washington bank accounts while half the population lives in poverty. As China becomes the first ...”

“... boom starting in the 1970s helped; rural incomes were boosted by the introduction of high-yield rice varieties; literacy rates, which had been abysmal, rose. Monopolies in cement, oil, timber, telecommunications, media and food were enjoyed by an indigenous business class that included Chinese-Indonesians as well as members of Suharto’s family (he ...”

“... though his analogy was the bell jar rather than the greenhouse – and proved experimentally by John Tyndall in 1859. In the 19th century it could be seen as unambiguously a good thing: if carbon dioxide and other trace gases didn’t trap heat in the atmosphere, the earth wouldn’t be warm enough to support life as we know it. But there is now far more ...”

“... They were the most real, the closest to the earth, to birth and death, to laughter and weeping.’ John Lossing Buck determined that 79 per cent of the Chinese labour force were farmers, with an average family farm of 2.62 acres. (In the United States, 40 acres had always been seen as the minimum for subsistence farming, as in ‘40 acres and a mule’.) This ...”

“... up into the girl’s narrative. Award nominations followed: Booker longlist, Orange shortlist, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize shortlist, Commonwealth Writers’ First Book Prize. Her new novel goes further. Half of a Yellow Sun – the title refers to the emblem on the Biafran flag – is narrated in the third person and switches, chapter by chapter, between ...”

“... on election night. But at least when Chicago Mayor Richard Daley helped to deliver Illinois to John Kennedy in the narrow contest of 1960, it was not televised. (For those keeping track of our dynastic democracy, Richard was father to William, the Gore campaign head, and to Richard II, the current Chicago Mayor.) One pants-down scene was captured live on ...”

“... improved on, with the publication of such instant classics as How to Become a Schizophrenic by John Modrow (1992) and How to Shit in the Woods by Kathleen Meyer (1989).1 There are people who will only read Westerns or Crime and others who prefer not to read any book unless, like the works of Maya Angelou, it manages somehow to have a self-help ...”