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“... recent academic literary studies for examples of what he calls ‘a genuinely critical impulse’, Joseph North picks out D.A. Miller’s subtle analysis of Jane Austen’s prose. ‘The critical voice speaking here is quite remarkable for the finesse with which it mimics the rhetorical effect it is describing,’ ...”

“... Julius Caesar Scaliger, one of the 16th century’s most formidable literary scholars, and his son Joseph, who, as it happens, was successor to Lipsius at Leiden. And if their distinctive styles of pedantry make the two of them discernible to connoisseurs of these things, there remains the fact that they are closely linked in many people’s minds by a ...”

“... Jenkin tells us, is that there have not been enough Steve Buxtons hovering over the rigs in the North Sea. And in the absence of a sufficient number of home-grown entrepreneurs, ministers and civil servants have felt obliged to see if they could force a few into life with a bucket of departmental fertiliser. Charles Wilson has argued that the main skill of ...”

“... as Carson puts it on the back cover, ‘a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night’. She adds: ‘The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them wrong.’ They are not formally linked but interesting connections among them can be found ...”

“... birth-rate. Given this pattern, the demographic centre of the Empire would eventually shift to North America, and so the only sensible British policy was to integrate its Colonies into a more expansive version of Empire. Though several major figures such as Pitt and Burke listened attentively as Franklin continued to expound this view, they happened not to ...”

“... were to be announced, gun battles broke out in Kinshasa between the Republican Guard of President Joseph Kabila and the troops of his main challenger, Vice-President Jean-Pierre Bemba. United Nations peacekeeping troops had to evacuate the president of the Independent Electoral Commission when the fighting got too close to his office. There were 33 ...”

“... the specialist, wrote for circles of experts. The decline in reputation of amateurs such as Sir Joseph Banks and James Audubon, both of whom had counted themselves as naturalists, was largely the result of their failure to contribute to the growing body of specialist literature. Coleridge, a careful student of the Linnaean tradition, objected that the ...”

“... of Mediterranean civilisation. Immigrants, illegal or otherwise, flood onto the mainland from North Africa via Sicily, and it is possible that Sicily will become a meeting point again, a place where Christian and Muslim cultures cross. But first, it needs to sort itself out, and the problems begin here. The Mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, takes the ...”

“... Joseph Mitchell​ of Fairmont, North Carolina lived one of the classic American lives: dreamy boy in a Southern town with a mother interested in the finer things, read a zillion books in college following no particular plan, decided he was going to get a newspaper job in New York City and become a writer, and by God did ...”

“... Joseph O’Neill’s grandfathers, one Irish, the other Turkish, were both imprisoned without trial during World War Two. Jim O’Neill was arrested in 1940, when Eamon de Valera’s Government, fearful that IRA activities might compromise Eire’s neutrality, rounded up all known IRA men. He was held for four years at the Curragh internment camp in County Kildare ...”

“... place. It’s true that the main reference back is to more violence, a long-range desert patrol in North Africa in 1943, which Lyall brings to life as vividly as Popski once did in Private Army. Lyall has a feeling for battles long ago and knows his World War Two, which he has used in this way before. He could be said to be repeating himself. Certainly he ...”

“... simply part of cosmological society, and the non-Buddhist shrines in the forest clearings of his north Indian territory were part of his aesthetic if not devotional landscape. ‘How delightful the Capala shrine is!’ he said during his terminal illness – an expression of pleasure of a kind which the scribes setting down the otherwise austere ...”

“... When Joseph Roth was asked once to write about his earliest memory, he described how as a baby he had seen his mother strip his cradle and hand it over to a strange woman, who ‘holds it to her chest, as though it were some trifling object of negligible dimensions, speaks for a long time, smiles, showing her long yellow teeth, goes to the door and leaves the house ...”

“... metaphor, deployed as the Volunteer is leaving the ‘broad brown murk’ of the Humber – ‘To north and south, a scanty shoreline welds the rusted steel of estuary and sky’ – welds the supposed opposites of nature and industry (and the rust is a reminder that industry is not immune to nature, that the destructive effects work in both directions). Also ...”

“... When Joseph Brodsky died in January 1996, there was in Russia a strong tendency to oversimplify his life, to reduce it to an outline, and at the same time to mythologise it as Pushkin’s life has been mythologised. It wasn’t so much that a second Pushkin had died, but that people wanted Brodsky to conform to their idea of a poet, and their idea of a poet is Pushkin ...”