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“... more than a prisoner of his history and heritage? It is a question worth asking. Many people have strong opinions about this Trinidadian expatriate, including the reviewers and interviewers he regularly deals with. The dividing line is essentially political, a fact that might be disquieting for a creative writer. In this respect Naipaul is more like ...”

“... have debated the extent to which Islamic terrorism derives from Islam itself: the belief in a strong link between the two is shared by many academics and politicians. The political scientist and Arabist Gilles Kepel insists that the root of Islamist terrorism lies within Islam. He has been invited, along with several of his students, to appear on behalf ...”

“... painter Franz Marc was among the artists who worked to the same end on the German side and, as Roy Behrens points out in this flamboyantly peculiar Encyclopedia of Camouflage, ships painted in the disruptive ‘dazzle’ schemes developed by the British artist Norman Wilkinson were said to resemble ‘Cubist paintings on a colossal scale’. Yet the First ...”

“... of plays that we had next to no chance of seeing; the house adverts by the subversive estate agent Roy Brooks that my brother read aloud (‘The décor is revolting … rain drips sadly onto the oilcloth … sacrifice £3500’). As Jeremy Lewis observes, it was a remarkably handsome newspaper, much more spacious in its page layouts and crisper in its ...”

“... to avoid moral judgment even on the purely personal aspect of the matter. The Daily Mail, that strong supporter of the idealisation of family life propounded by Mrs Thatcher’s court thinkers, talked of Mr Parkinson’s ‘private folly’: but it is ‘all too easy to be censorious and to apportion blame’, it sympathised, and blamed ‘bizarre working ...”

“... an idea that was actually prefigured by the beliefs and works of people such as Raja Rammohun Roy in Bengal in the early 19th century and Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, the Anglo-Portuguese poet and lecturer at the Hindu College, Calcutta, and his fervent Bengali followers. The metaphorical laboratory turned out to be the Indian middle classes. Bengal had ...”

“... the mast, she explains why Irish churchmen could expect little money or favour: ‘An English Vice-roy, English Judges, English Bishops, with their long Train of Relations and Dependents, lay their hard hands on all Preferments.’ The Reverend Mr Pilkington was not above Laetitia’s touch, having no expectations and few possessions: ‘I found Mr Pilkington ...”

“... hated the clichés and party-line posturing, and dismissed the pamphlet as ‘bloody rot’. Roy Campbell jeered at the Republicans: ‘The sodomites are on your side;/The cowards and the cranks.’ Ezra Pound said the enemy wasn’t Franco, but big-time international finance: ‘You are all had. Spain is an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed ...”

“... to provide more state funding for science (plus ça change), but on this occasion he was on strong ground, since Gladstone’s attempt to defend the historical veracity of the account of creation in Genesis had carelessly argued that birds came before land creatures. This amateurishness, combined with the intolerable length of Gladstone’s ...”

“... way: it has shaken up his politics. In Tinker Tailor, we’re told that a minor character, a strong-arm specialist called Ricki Tarr, was recruited to help suppress ‘the Malayan emergency’ before being ‘called back to Brixton and refitted for special operations in Kenya – or, in less sophisticated language, hunting Mau Mau for bounty’. The main ...”

“... boys in bed. The Book of Psalms allows us 70 years, or maybe 80 if our constitution is especially strong, but that span was much diminished from what it once had been. The cause of this sad decline was bad diet. The fruit of the tree from which Adam and Eve were permitted to eat conferred immortality; the forbidden fruit gave knowledge of good and evil; and ...”

“... summoned to Washington to account for his radical past by Joe McCarthy, and taunted and grilled by Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief counsel, in March 1953. The transcripts of those sessions, declassified in 2003, present a battle of wits, as Hughes ducks or deflects or refutes Cohn’s assaults without ever seeming to lose his cool, though his livelihood was on ...”

“... also produced a string of politicians, including Herbert Asquith, Harold Macmillan, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Edward Heath.Murray’s family may not have been Balliol men (he was the third generation of his family to study across the road at Exeter College), but their scholarly and civil service genealogy conforms to its ethos, and Murray hints at a close ...”

“... of Lord Randolph Churchill and the brusque treatment that statesman suffered at the hands of Roy Foster comes irresistibly to mind.) Albert liked Peel not only for his high seriousness, sense of public duty and moral commitment to the welfare of the mass of the people: what he also (and more materially) liked him for was the fact that they shared a high ...”

“... would now call human rights) activity, much of it conducted in the pub. I therefore grew up with a strong feeling that dissidence, morally admirable though it might appear, was basically a lifestyle choice, fun for natural troublemakers but tough on their families. When I first went to Moscow, in 1966, it was with a firm determination to avoid the two ...”