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“... it: ‘In a less confused world, his glory would be greater than his guilt.’ In a similar mood, David Thomson published a biography in which every chapter ends with a dialogue of self-examination by the critic, and in which Welles’s best-known innovation is side-swiped and helped to its feet all in the course of a sentence: ‘In truth, there was more ...”

“... borrowing requirement are transformed by measurements which allow for price changes, so Morris and David Savage, in the same book, make the even more telling observation that public expenditure and income are not dependent solely on government policy. They vary with fluctuations in the economy, since these fluctuations will change the expenditure needs (for ...”

“... a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularised by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly. ‘Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog.’ The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard. Musical ...”

“... to scientific advances as the Germans had. (That Dreadnought had to be armoured with Krupps steel was a particular cause of angst.) As well as the inadequacies of technical education, the universities were too few in number and too narrow intellectually. The Victorians and Edwardians probably exaggerated the failings of British management and ...”

“... art can make and the support it can give to bad government are evident in Bell’s treatment of David (‘this cheerleader-cum-weathervane’) and the Death of Marat. He tracks its ‘terse, glare-lit, blocked-off pictorial space’ back to Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi, and the genre, the martyr-portrait, to religious art: ‘...”

“... to be added to spore suspensions to stop them clumping when they are prepared and dried, but as David Henderson from Porton Down said in 1952, in a journal to be found in any medical school library, ‘fortunately many substances added to the suspension will prevent clumping. The simplest and most effective that has been found is sodium alginate used in ...”

“... are a proper visible expression of forces at work on the structure. The final result, according to David Newland, technical adviser to the bridge’s funding body, is ‘probably the most complex passively-damped structure in the world’. (In an actively-damped system an input of energy is required to answer the force with a counterforce; in a passive ...”

“... during May’s long tenure at the Home Office. Timothy is from Birmingham, where his father was a steel worker, and he studied politics at the University of Sheffield. Hill, a journalist from post-industrial Greenock on the west coast of Scotland, was less obviously policy-focused than Timothy, but her role extended far beyond communications and May’s ...”

“... with enthusiasm in 1984-85, as more rough and ready activists, reminiscent of the ‘denims’ in David Peace’s miners’ strike novel, GB84. But Gildea’s history of community mobilisation challenges the Conservatives’ depiction of unionised miners as a threat to democracy, Thatcher’s ‘enemy within’.Raymond Williams thought that the ...”

“... The hulks are both disturbing and ridiculous, redolent of death and of hubris. The great slabs of steel still seem indestructible, and yet there they are, destroyed.The taxi barrelled down the hill towards the Ukrainian House. The driver wasn’t watching the road. He had his eyes and fingers on his phone, clipped to the dashboard. I recognised the ...”

“... disease has been one of the central realities of human life. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) is overly deterministic, but the basic point it makes about the importance of contagious illness to human history remains valid. The map of our planet was shaped by infectious disease: Cortés gets most of the blame/credit, but it was the viruses he ...”

“... own rules about such matters, and Carter herself was convinced that what she called her ‘core of steel’, her ‘sense of my sex’s ascendancy in the scheme of things’, ‘a natural dominance, a native savagery’ had come straight to her from her grandma, skipping a generation on the way. But when the Carters returned to the family home in ...”

“... salmonella’). Then there is the long line of sex-scandal casualties: Cecil Parkinson, Tim Yeo, David Mellor (greatly exaggerated, but not his only alleged misdemeanour), Hartley Booth, Michael Brown (though he is a borderline case, since he resigned from office while denying allegations that he had had a homosexual relationship). We should also not forget ...”

“... and, according to official figures, killed around 12,000 in combat, though the real figure, in David Anderson’s view, is ‘likely to have been more than 20,000’. In addition, Caroline Elkins claims, up to 100,000 died in the detention camps. It is the scale of the British atrocities in Kenya that is the most startling revelation of these books. We ...”

“... its failure to maintain the extraordinary industrial and scientific leadership it once attained. David Edgerton’s book, the more academic of the two, is a brilliant and often very aggressive challenge to a set of assumptions about the recent past. James Hamilton-Paterson, still one of England’s most skilled and alluring prose writers in or out of ...”