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“... the way Cheri’s life is passing in front of her eyes, in random unrelated glimpses, one or two a day.’ Not long before she travels to meet Dr Kevorkian, she sees a utility worker up a telephone pole outside her window, whose ‘sprig of snipped wire falls through the air to the grass below’. This image harks back to ‘Werner’; as the fire begins, ‘a ...”

“... sometimes, though not always, meant. They may be more shocked to learn from Hoare (quoting Robin Maugham) that in youth Coward was a gifted and audacious shoplifter (‘a daredevil game many adolescents play’). Hoare tells us that in the spring of 1918 the precocious Coward, 18 years old, received a ‘salutary lesson in British justice – and ...”

“... woman bathed in sweat sitting in a gym, and underneath the words: ‘Doing this routine every day can seem like grunt work.’ I thought of a photo I saw in the Portland Oregonian of Indonesian women toiling at one of the country’s many sports-shoe assembly plants. The women were arrayed in a line, each wearing a T-shirt with a Nike swoosh on the ...”

“... bigger fish. You know which side your bread’s buttered on,’ was his usual comment. Then one day he just said, ‘Fuck off,’ and that was the end of it. Bureaucratic indifference was the same in death as in life. One widow tells of searching for days for her husband’s coffin, which was finally discovered in the corner of a provincial airport, among ...”

“... and the maniacal raid on the Lebanon, led him to reflect on the likelihood that Israel might one day soon use these monstrous weapons. The argument of the ‘deterrent’, deployed so effectively to take the sting from the disarmament movement in countries like Britain and the United States, hardly applied to Israel. The governments of the other nuclear ...”

“... Years later, my Durban state school, Northlands, had two old boys on opposing sides in a test: Robin Smith for England, Shaun Pollock for South Africa. The Coloured all-rounder Basil D’Oliveira came to prominence in 1958, when he led a ‘non-white’ tour to Kenya. Some of his achievements on that tour were staggering – 46 runs off one eight-ball ...”

“... his next appointment. Enough, it seemed. There are miles of such security tapes generated every day in Federal Government buildings. To have been kept for five years and located immediately, this particular extract must have been clipboarded as a matter of clandestine ribaldry by White House underlings (‘Some people ought to have mutes for servants in ...”

“... of organised policing itself in Britain. Modern political policing began on Saint Patrick’s Day 1883, when four CID men and eight uniformed officers were picked to form the Special Irish Branch, in response to a Fenian bombing campaign on the mainland. In 1888, the word ‘Irish’ was dropped from the title, and the unit widened its net to include ...”

“... real . . .’ ends with the lyrical iambic pentameter, ‘I feel the glass collide with light and day’), but it is impossible to judge what effect was intended. Dylan Thomas may have been happy to intone the poems at his reading (they are remarkably sonorous), but their difficulty prompted unenthusiastic reviews, including Hugh MacDiarmid’s dismissive ...”

“... Hansard, to find out who was spoken of among her colleagues as the Coming Man. She reported back a day or so later. ‘Tony Blair.’ ‘Never heard of him.’ ‘He’s a used Johnnie,’ she added – this being the name by which former members of St John’s College, Oxford, refer to themselves. We knew that because both of us were also, to use the posh ...”

“... the morning after was arguably nothing more than a cosmetic change on the face of Israel. On the day of the election I woke up in my apartment in Tel Aviv, but I had to get to Jerusalem to vote, since I have never told the authorities (or myself) that I am a Tel Avivian (I am not: I just happen to live there). The radio was celebrating democracy’s great ...”

“... In 1999, Blair calls to offer Mullin a post as a bottom-ranking minister. First he accepts. Next day he resigns. Blair gets back on the phone. He dangles the prospect of promotion to minister of state sooner rather than later. Mullin accepts again. He quits as chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee and joins what is baggily known as the Department of ...”

“... Barbara Hosking​ was eating chicken curry in a bungalow in Tanganyika one day in the 1950s when she felt the room shaking. She was lunching with her old schoolfriend Mary, and this was the bungalow they shared. Both women were then working as office managers for a British-owned gold, copper and silver mine in Mpanda ...”

“... by a blandly generic term. Perhaps the best strategy would be to vary one’s surname from day to day to avoid the indignity of being labelled. Stereotypes, however, are not always pejorative, whatever these authors may think. They write in their preface of the ways that ‘deeply ingrained stereotypes shed negative ...”

“... a notice on a wreath of chrysanthemums announces that Reg Stone passed peacefully away on Boxing Day and that his cortège will be passing through the market at three o’clock. Until I read the card I’d never known his last name. Reg’s stall was a feature of the market long before I moved here in 1961. Then he had two prices, sixpence and a shilling. In ...”