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“... us. I got up and went to the laptop. The Times front page was online: ‘Salmond quits as powers for Scotland are blocked’. The devo-max ‘vow’ was already falling apart, surprise surprise, the ‘vow’ that Cameron, Miliband and Clegg had all signed and presented to the Scottish people on the front page of the Daily Record, where it was mocked ...”

“... on China in 1859-60, after the Chinese emperor resisted a trade treaty insisted on by the two powers, who had just bombarded Canton. More than 200 ships arrived with 23,000 men and modern artillery, attacked the forts on the river Pei-ho, and opened a path to Peking. After the Chinese captured and tortured a Times correspondent, the allied forces razed ...”

“... green contact lenses, painfully painted on. Sole survivor of Atlantis, he used his special powers, notably the ability to survive high atmospheric pressure, to foil the evil plans of an evil-looking villain with an evil-looking beard and an evil-sounding German name: Schubert. Even my enormous teenage appetite for the fantastical and men in swimming ...”

“... every high-profile prosecution launched since 11 September 2001, from John Walker Lindh and Richard Reid to Zacharias Moussaoui and José Padilla. This is particularly mystifying given Ferguson’s pronouncements elsewhere. He asserts in his introduction that ‘we learn from the past in order to guard us from ourselves,’ and his case studies ...”

“... and the Ottomans, and at various moments they openly acknowledged the superiority of the Muslim powers with which Elizabeth repeatedly put England on friendly terms.’ Elizabethan England’s encounter with Islam was not a clash of civilisations – not least because England’s status as ‘civilised’ was hardly settled in early modern ...”

“... competition of vulgar ‘empiricks’, often peddled their own proprietary nostrums. The great Dr Richard Mead hawked a rabies powder under his own name; Dr Hans Sloane marketed medicinal chocolate; Dr Nehemiah Grew took out a patent on Epsom Salts. How to make a medical reputation in such a world? How to make a medical living? A satirist advised the upwardly ...”

“... perpetually present – and never more so than in this almost incredibly vivid biography. Richard Holmes has a genius for the job, as he showed fifteen years ago in his biography of Shelley. In a sense, there is no need to bring Coleridge to life, but in this compelling narrative of those early years of the poet Holmes makes us seem actually to be ...”

“... with Japanese to a degree he makes plain even to me who know not a syllable of the language, Richard Bowring has forfeited some command of English. That looks all the likelier when he skids into bad grammar: ‘ ... sent to whomever was to copy out the story’. Or perhaps both the ‘indiscrete’ and the ‘whomever’ are misprints. If so, there is ...”

“... of ‘obscenity’). It says on page 3, wrongly, that in the same case John Mortimer defended Richard Neville, and on page 122 that he did not. In one of the brief excursions into cinema, there is a very muddled account of the French treatment of pornographic films. Pasolini’s Salo was not assigned to the ‘P’ category and sent to the blue ...”

“... resources (fire stations, barracks, power stations and so on). Its existence proves how close the powers that be thought they were to a revolution. It is unique – all copies were supposed to have been destroyed – and came to the British Library from the Ministry of Defence only in 1995. Even longer under cover was the map on which ...”

“... would count as work). Nearly always he was accompanied by Clyde Tolson. A previous biographer, Richard Gid Powers, described the Tolson-Hoover partnership as ‘spousal’: this seems to be Gage’s sense of it, too. Were they lovers? Gage acknowledges the possibility, but doesn’t commit herself. She’s similarly ...”

“... of his predecessors had dreamed of. Roused after the relatively benign neglect of the absentee Richard Coeur de Lion, the northern barons were the most conspicuous in the rebellion. John raised huge sums for his doomed attempt to recover his lost empire, and in doing so provoked huge resentment. As Carpenter remarks, ‘had John been content with ruling ...”

“... that the US should assume ‘leadership of a united democratic bloc’ against the authoritarian powers of China and Russia and has found an influential reader in John McCain, an old-style promoter of American toughness. But it’s now quite hard to imagine Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin, not to mention Osama bin Laden and other ‘enemies of the Free ...”

“... upon to appear in public, has in this treatise given a most notable instance of the extent of the powers of the mind.’ This is how the very first review of the Principia began, in summer 1687: from the start, you were forced to admire Newton’s modesty, and his genius. The reviewer, the young astronomer Edmond Halley, knew what he was talking about. Three ...”

“... see it, an independent Kurdistan by the cynical manipulations of the French and British colonial powers in the aftermath of the First World War, over the next hundred years they suffered serial and escalating repression: detention, torture and execution; the destruction of villages and bombardment with sundry weapons, including napalm and poison gas; and ...”