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“... member of the Conservative pantheon – Churchill, Thatcher, Disraeli – but the Liberal radical Joseph Chamberlain. As mayor of Birmingham in the 1870s, Chamberlain employed the techniques of municipal socialism to better the lives of its inhabitants, using compulsory purchase to establish efficient local monopolies in water and gas. The prospect of Irish ...”

“... felt like when she wrote about it in wartime Philadelphia in the fall of 1781. Grace’s husband, Joseph, a prominent Pennsylvania politician, had been a delegate to the first Continental Congress, convened in 1774 to find a resolution to the 13 colonies’ grievances against Britain. Hoping to stave off open war, Galloway proposed a plan for closer imperial ...”

“... the confidence, the self-deprecating humour and the sense of danger to be found in the whole work. Joseph Roth was a survivor from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which he made the object of both affection and criticism in his novels. He is best-known for a family history, Radetsky March. Weights and Measures is a short piece, first published in 1937; like a ...”

“... in its early years, advocates of a reformation of the ancien régime in Britain – a few, notably Joseph Priestley, were veterans of public discussion; others, like William Godwin, Coleridge, Helen Maria Williams and James Montgomery, were just setting out on careers that promised extraordinary achievements. They are unusual suspects because they were not ...”

“... by one of the authors. One claim which the authors make most surely be discounted: that Pope John XXIII may have had connections with the Prieuré. While admitting that the claim is incapable of proof, they point, among other insubstantial considerations, to his lifting of the ban on Freemasonry. They assert that his Apostolic Letter of 1960 (the text of ...”

“... from Alsace. The Krulls – there are two daughters, Anna (30) and Elisabeth (17), and one son, Joseph (25), born on either side of the Great War – have expanded the bar to include an épicerie and a bargees’ chandlery. They live at the very edge of town, near a lock, where the yellow trams turn round. The complex genealogy, legal status and time-line ...”

“... détente with the United States of America is suddenly a possibility. The aged President Kennedy (Joseph P., not John F.) plans to fly to Berlin for a summit meeting. Since all this is conjecture as to how things might have turned out, it can only be assessed against your own, or other people’s, conjectures. The two ...”

“... writings which, had they not been written by a Jew, would be considered rabidly anti-semitic. Joseph, the hero of the novel Thieves in the Night, which is set in Palestine, looks about at his fellow Jews and feels ‘revulsion against this assembly of thick, curved noses, fleshy lips and liquid eyes’. It was ‘no good denying to himself that he ...”

“... pseudonyms of George G. Gilman, Charles R. Pike, Thomas H. Stone. Like his compatriots ‘John G. MeLaglen’ and J.T. Edson, Harknett has ‘appreciation societies’ devoted to his pseudonymous personae. (‘J.T.’, incidentally, the biggest seller of them all, claims his name is genuine. It’s a happy accident.) Multiple pseudonymy as a device of ...”

“... and the aggressively idiosyncratic construction that is the memorial to the family of Sir John Soane (‘architect to the Bank of England &c &c &c’, as the inscription proclaims) in the burial ground next to Old St Pancras Church – the romantic spot where Shelley first caught sight of Mary Godwin, but now part of some lugubrious gardens sandwiched ...”

“... The longest years of Joseph Heller’s writing life fell between his first book and his second. He set no records but the delay eventually got his name into magazine pieces about one-book authors, a cautionary roster of the silent that included Margaret Mitchell, J.D. Salinger, Harper Lee and Ralph Ellison. Heller’s history reflected theirs – the dreams of youth and years of literary apprenticeship, a period of obsessed scribbling, enthusiasm from a publisher, a ripple of applause from the fraternity of reviewers, followed by the ever mysterious and arbitrary embrace of readers in their multitude ...”

“... in Jewish populations, in the Eastern marches of Austria-Hungary (think of the Galician, Joseph Roth). In Celan’s case, this came to him from his mother: German was, in every sense, his mother-tongue. Already as a boy, he loved poetry, first Goethe and Schiller, then Hölderlin, Heine, Trakl, Kafka and in particular Rilke. He spoke ...”

“... who range from newspaper editors to political historians, it may make very little difference. As John Kenneth Galbraith has observed, changing the top man in important business corporations rarely affects the price of their shares on the market. A rapid glance at the history of the USA also suggests scepticism about the impact of individual leaders. That ...”

“... Joseph Rykwert is unhappy about the current condition of architecture, the principal subject of his long career as a historian. In the conclusion to The Judicious Eye, he complains that ‘new imaging techniques made possible by information technology have allowed architects to shape their buildings without reference to the unavoidable orthogonalities of building or the routine repetition of windows, columns, beams and suchlike ...”

“... the same thing does not happen again. One of Ratushinskaya’s poems describes a dream in which John the Baptist appears in the Gulag, filthy and ragged, and is succoured by one of the female inmates before he gets ready to fly away. She longs for a miracle, to see her daughter, and begs him to perform it. But he is silent, weeping, and she wakes up from a ...”