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“... He might, perhaps, be classified as a One-Nation Tory: but he was the cousin and friend of Richard Crossman and perfectly at home in the company of Labour politicians. One of his hallmarks is an interest in the ideas of the Left and a readiness to address them with a measure of respect. He is, indeed, strongly reminiscent of the type of army officer in ...”

“... from the Field (2017), the former director of Iranian affairs at the National Security Council, Richard Nephew, described the sanctions as based on ‘objectives for the imposition of pain’, accompanied by instructions for ‘the conditions necessary for the removal of pain’. It’s the torturer’s schema, taken straight from the war on terror ...”

“... episode in the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire, the bloodiest war waged between European powers in what was a largely peaceful century after 1815, and the only time during that century when British troops fought on European soil, albeit in its most distant corner, the lozenge-shaped Crimean peninsula dangling into the Black Sea. A Russian possession ...”

“... period is that capital punishment ended so soon in one part of Germany. All four occupying powers employed it in their judicial systems – the French only ended public executions in 1939 – and used it extensively against war criminals and others in the troubled years after 1945. The British, taking no chances, even imported the official ...”

“... Richard Hoggart​ made much in his writings of the scholarship child’s uprootedness and anxiety, but his own dislocation had its limits. Although he went from a primary school in a poor part of Leeds to grammar school and on to university, Hoggart never really made what the novelist Storm Jameson, a generation ahead of him at the University of Leeds, called the ‘journey from the North ...”

“... pot never boils’. No one can wholly avoid hating ‘Old Daddy Franklin’, from whose Poor Richard’s Almanac these sayings come, especially if brought up to revere him in Public School, USA. Abraham Lincoln is the father of his people; George Washington, of his nation; but Benjamin Franklin – as it happens, a basically very decent man – hovers ...”

“... AND CREATED SUCH AN EXPERIMENT IN PUBLISHING AND NEVER BEFORE HAS A WRITER AT THE HEIGHT OF HER POWERS WRITTEN TWO SUCH POWERFUL AND MOVING BOOKS IN ANOTHER PERSONA The story is now well-known. In 1982, a writer who called herself ‘Jane Somers’ submitted her ‘first novel’ to three London publishers. Two of them – Cape and Granada – turned it ...”

“... embodied the restless, forward movements of his era, ‘the spirit of the age’. In his new book Richard Jay has explained how and why this happened. There have been several biographies and studies of Chamberlain, but this is the best analysis of the public man, finely wrought and exact, and undoubtedly demanding of the reader. Old politics can be very stale ...”

“... war. The Spanish Civil War was for me just that, but a war waged solely by the great imperialist powers could not be. What changed my thinking was the German attack on Russia. What continued to make me unreconciled to this decision was the bombast of Churchill, in which the silver prose of Augustan English was, as I saw it, melted down into racist ...”

“... compiled is impressive and often amusing. Back to Seneca they go, and forwards and outwards to Richard Brautigan. Busily, the melons, pumpkins and gourds are gathered in. Each quotation is given, cacophonously, in its original language (the translations appear elsewhere, which is a monstrous imposition), and its meaning rapidly adduced. Bit by bit ...”

“... nature of reality. They would thereby inform us what we really are, what we are compelled to be by powers not ourselves. They would exhibit the stamp which had been impressed on all of us. This impress would not be blind, because it would not be a matter of chance, a mere contingency. It would be necessary, essential, telic, constitutive of what it is to be a ...”

“... Muscovy and Prussia, on either side of the Commonwealth, grew into despotic, centralised military powers, soon to become predatory empires. The other path to safety, strangely, was to be weak, malleable and manipulable. Authority in Poland-Lithuania was widely distributed, to put it mildly. That suited neighbours like Russia: factions could be bought and ...”

“... allowed the pope to hire and fire his English bishops and give their dioceses English placenames. Richard II’s prime aim in the Great Praemunire Statute of 1392 was to prevent the pope and his favoured cardinals from taking juicy revenues out of England. British membership of the EU has, per contra, attracted billions of foreign capital to Britain, while ...”

“... the judges made life difficult for some of the canal and railway boards, they also used their powers to compel reluctant local justices, most of whom were themselves employers, to convict mill-owners of breaches of provisions of the Factories Acts designed to protect workers from injury or death. And when in 1863 a builder called Cooper found that the ...”

“... CIA was a Soviet spy. After such sleuthing it is a relief to find in this book of essays edited by Richard Langhorne an article on the Cambridge spies by a don, and it is by far the most sensible account so far written. It is the best because Christopher Andrew is a historian at Corpus Christi, Cambridge who has become the leading authority on the Intelligence ...”