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“... that she will always be beholden to you, however you behave. Conscious or unconscious, such was James Joyce’s strategy with regard to Dublin, to Ireland. From the age of 22 until his death at 58 he lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy, Switzerland and France, but his creative attention remained focused on the Dublin he grew up in. Though he spoke ...”

“... have to satisfy the demands of the all-powerful and long-serving head of CIA counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton, who has recently died. The undeniably brilliant Angleton was also at least half-crazy. He saw moles everywhere and had paralysed the CIA for years on end with his frenetic witch-hunting. (One CIA officer wrote a bitter report suggesting that ...”

“... which was fully as lurid and preposterous as its title (put out by the ‘respected firm’ of Simon and Schuster) might suggest. Its central allegation was that an old personal enemy of mine had been a key ‘agent of influence’ in Reagan-era Washington. I could believe anything of this man except that his ‘controllers’ had awarded him the hilarious ...”

“... A User’s Manual describes the contents and inhabitants of a Parisian apartment block at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier. The block is ten storeys high and ten units wide, and the order in which the apartments are treated is determined by the route a knight at chess would have to take to cover all the squares on a ten x ten chessboard without alighting on the same ...”

“... and learn abstract concepts. ‘If one could devise a successful chess machine,’ Herbert Simon and others suggested in 1958, ‘one would seem to have penetrated to the core of the human intellectual endeavour.’ Combine this with its clear measures of success and readily formalised rules, and chess seemed to offer the perfect testbed for artificial ...”

“... Edward Keith-Roach OBE and Sir Arthur Wauchope, had much the same experience as Queen Michal. Simon Sebag Montefiore in his biography of the city rather wistfully describes their rule as a golden age in Jerusalem’s history, when decorous gatherings of religious leaders from all faiths might pose for a group photo in the cool Oxford Gothic surroundings ...”

“... in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with Nicolson. After Coats died in 1990, the diaries passed to Channon’s son, Paul, who died in 2007. Now, with the encouragement of his children, three formidable volumes have ...”

“... Into the Heart of Borneo contains much pretty tiresome knockabout between the reverenced James Fenton, whose every quip is sacredly recorded, and the bumbling O’Hanlon. The precise descriptions of birds are far more entertaining. For this next trip O’Hanlon again approached James Fenton but received from the ...”

“... of William Blake intoning ‘Ah, Sunflower’ to him ‘like God had a human voice’. James Campbell, who introduces a note of irony into his reworking of twice-told Beat tales, refers to Ginsberg’s historic undergraduate illumination as ‘hand-held’ – perhaps an allusion to a key detail in what he had said to me: the fact that an act of ...”

“... Palmer concentrated on white revolutionaries, in his 1938 classic, The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James successfully revived interest in the slaves and free blacks active in Saint-Domingue’s revolution in 1791. Arguing that liberty, equality and fraternity meant even more to the enslaved in France’s richest Caribbean colony than to the inhabitants of ...”

“... his company’s public repertoire at the Globe, received its first documented performance before James I’s court at Whitehall on 26 December 1606. It was then printed in 1608, as M. William Shak-speare, his True Chronicle History of the life and death of King LEAR and his three daughters, but even after spending fifteen years or more training and nerving ...”

“... and myths, mean that it isn’t an easy task to write the history of the artist’s studio. James Hall’s book touches on many things – self-portraits and celebrity, memorabilia and mirrors – and the physical spaces themselves come in and out of view. In this respect, it’s helpful to know that the term ‘studio’ derives from a verb as well as ...”

“... block is as utopian as Verne’s submarine. Though it has a sufficiently mundane address (11 Rue Simon-Crubellier, Paris XVII) and though the narrative present can be precisely located in time (it is just before 8 p.m. on 23 June 1975), the last thing that Life: A User’s Manual sets out to do is to portray or comment on Parisian life in the Seventies. The ...”

“... gloss on Trump’s philosophy. In the first pages of his memoir, The Room Where It Happened (Simon and Schuster, £25), Bolton takes pains to lay out how busy he was before joining the Trump administration and how eagerly Trump’s team pursued him. The first jobs he was offered in the administration were not big or important enough: he turned down ...”

“... Everything else will be diffused to the community. Loosely directed by the head of NHS England, Simon Stevens, money, staff and new investment are being directed towards primary care – family doctors, community nurses, souped-up local clinics, systems to help the chronically unwell live at home. In universe two a counter-reality prevails: the reality of ...”