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“... to keep escalating. Despite the ominous backdrop of the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon began a series of occasional bilateral discussions with Leonid Brezhnev aimed at managing the Cold War more calmly. Tensions in Asia were high, and China’s rivalry with the Soviet Union was intensifying, while the Berlin Wall had already ...”

“... departments, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and among these appointees are shrewd, broad-minded and courteous men (they are inevitably men), eager to talk about their work and the monarch whom they serve. In 2007, I spent a few weeks talking at length to several of them. They were far from being detached and objective observers, but they ...”

“... brassy and vulgar, too proud of revealing that what the intellectuals really yearn for is broad public acclaim, financial success, and the perks, privileges and luxuries bestowed up to that time only on the high rollers in business, investment and entertainment. The book was always, in my view, persuasive and engaging; it has since been accepted as ...”

“... and brilliantly starched white shirt with narrow black stripes. A brown, green and gold tie in broad stripes, of stiff and hard imitation watered silk. The particulars neither solicit nor receive celebration, and the end is a return: ‘The crease is still sharp in the trousers.’ The clothes are ready for wearing on Sunday, and this is what they will ...”

“... The modes, finally, differ in respect of how persuasive they are; in this respect they cover a broad spectrum. Annas and Barnes highlight the differences among the modes, but they still show how all can be plausibly seen as expressions of a unified general attitude. They connect the modes with contemporary epistemological concerns, but they still preserve ...”

“... Edward Diestelkamp in giving equal credit for the building’s structure to the ironfounder Richard Turner as to its architect, Decimus Burton. The lives of the building’s inhabitants – plant and human – are glimpsed in short but informative chapters which describe the inception of the idea for such a building, its design, manufacture and ...”

“... however. Calasso may move effortlessly from Pol Pot to Goethe, or from discussion of the Vedas to Richard Cobb’s favourite uncle, but in the process he is always rehearsing the same ideas about sacrifice, revolution and modernity. The crucial question is whether the repetition of these ideas in so many different contexts reinforces or diffuses their ...”

“... readiness to immerse himself in the archives and tease out the meaning of details reminds me of Richard Cobb, though perhaps a more appropriate comparison would be another famous archival mole, Jules Michelet, who also wrote about women and the sea, and tried to unravel the substance from which France was made. As Michelet put it in a famous passage, which ...”

“... hardest to acquire. It was touch and go. He died in 1940, just before the British Empire. In 1953, Richard Usborne published a book called Clubland Heroes, which expanded some of the criticisms made of John Buchan in the Thirties: that he was snobbish, blimpish, mildly anti-semitic and a worshipper of worldly success. What infuriated his widow was not so much ...”

“... America’s entire policy towards the Middle East. American policy-makers were divided into two broad schools of thought, the even-handed school and the Israel-first school. The even-handed school, of which George Ball was a leading member, argued that America should not identify too closely or exclusively with Israel because this could jeopardise ...”

“... at Shorty and Malcolm in their immaculate zoot-suits, long coats, baggy pants tight at the ankles, broad-brimmed hats with giant feathers. Ruth Carter, the costume designer for the movie, interviewed in By Any Means Necessary, says she had six suits for Malcolm but neither she nor Lee wanted the audience to start thinking: ‘Where’s he getting all these ...”

“... so as to get my bearings again. I say ‘unfairly’ because neither author aims to do anything as broad as Lopez, whose book combined an awareness of the region’s history with a naturalist’s knowledge of its ecology. Kavenna pursues the myth of Thule, and Davidson the imaginative allure the North has for artists and writers. Neither mentions Lopez ...”

“... Refreshingly, Anderson doesn’t dwell on this personal side. He is more interested in two other broad aspects of the Lawrence story: first, his actual campaigns (Anderson is ‘a veteran war correspondent’ familiar with modern-day conflicts in the Middle East); and second, the broader context of those campaigns, which involves giving space to a number of ...”

“... into the charmed and the irritated, and as the book goes on, proceeding by way of loose themes and broad chronology, reasons for irritation multiply. Harris seems oddly incurious about how and why writing and art about weather changes from time to time. She has no organising argument and not much sense of history, so inevitably the book turns into a personal ...”

“... The political divisions that mattered in the 1630s were not between an effete establishment and a broad-based opposition but within the government, where reasoned cases for and against foreign involvement turned not only on underlying commitments of principle or strategy but on finely balanced diplomatic calculation. Historians, as Stubbs acknowledges, have ...”