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“... to games: exaggerating the hooligan problem allows Murdoch and club chairmen to fleece the fans. David Conn’s The Football Business is a damning analysis of commercialisation.1 His story starts at the Royal Lancaster Hotel on 18 May 1992, when Sky Sports was in competition with Greg Dyke of ITV for the Premiership rights. ITV are said to have put up £262 ...”

“... not be living in Lambeth Palace and making speeches in the Lords’ (Spectator, 19 January). Boris Johnson, not one to be left behind in any hyperbole contest, told last year’s Tory Party Conference that ‘the authors of the Chequers proposal risk prosecution under the 14th-century statute of praemunire, which says that ‘no foreign court or government ...”

“... triumph was not its new pedestrian squares, but the presence of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and the rest of the US basketball ‘dream team’.What was Olympism without amateurism? Samaranch attempted to fill the ideological void by bringing the IOC into line with the emerging concerns of international politics in the 1990s, incorporating human ...”

“... same gag: ‘Not only did he disbelieve in ghosts; he was not even frightened of them.’ As Dr Johnson said on the subject of the possibility of a post-mortem appearance among the living (he too is quoted in this remarkable book), ‘All argument is against it, but all belief is for it.’ And not just belief. History has a role as well. The ...”

“... The song​  we hear at the beginning of David Leitch’s film Bullet Train is the Bee Gees’ ‘Stayin’ Alive’. It’s a good song and all too relevant, but by the time the movie’s plot gets rolling it sounds more like a fragile wish than any sort of programme. ‘Fate is a name for my bad luck,’ a leading character says ...”

“... from, and in a sense complementary to, American Sublime, another celebration of wilderness, which David Craig wrote about in the last issue of the LRB.Fulton has made many walks of many kinds in many places over the last thirty years. But because a walk must exist in the present, and take place elsewhere, all he has to offer in the gallery are wall ...”

“... in connecting the satire to the indignant, then furious, then maddened man who wrote it. Dr Johnson, in his 1781 Life of Swift, seemed to make official the theory that a terrible indignation finally and corrosively turned in on itself. ‘Having ... excluded conversation, and desisted from study, he had neither business nor amusement; for having, by ...”

“... marched behind not only the vice president but a statement by the most famous American general, David Petraeus, in testimony before Congress. Petraeus said that the unsolved question of Palestine was the largest ‘root’ danger to American security at home and abroad. For this resistance to Netanyahu, President Obama has been assailed in an open letter by ...”

“... South Africa through a European-style industrial revolution compressed into twenty years. David Goldblatt (b.1930) began taking photographs in the gold-mining areas in his teens. Many of them, and the ones that followed, tell the story of South Africa’s labouring classes, predominantly black, in a world shaped by race laws and extractive ...”

“... a dangerous job without sanction, but that enforcing that right was tortuous.On 23 March, Boris Johnson announced a lockdown. ‘Travelling to and from work’ was permitted, he said, ‘but only where this is absolutely necessary and cannot be done from home.’ Lawyers were immediately inundated with requests for clarification. Did he mean that the work ...”

“... carrying out the tests on Josephine he and I chatted about the great days of Charlie Cooke, David Webb and Peter Osgood. He told me it was already too late to try AZT and 3TC on Josephine but he was cautiously hopeful. ‘To get Aids there has to be mixing of blood, which means there has to be a break in the skin or an open sore due to some other ...”

“... at home. Since then, Britain has lost its empire, but not its entanglements. In Part Two Paul Johnson writes of working-class borrowings and savings between 1870 and 1939. Pawnshop loans were in perpetual demand. Thrift, to the surprise of observers, was oftener a provision for burial than for sickness, and funeral spending was often curiously lavish. So ...”

“... at the University of Texas was one of the two principal sponsors (along with the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library), although the president and staff of the hyper-rich Pennzoil Company and sundry U of T outfits are also thanked for their ‘support’. America may be undergoing Thirdworldisation but it cannot catch up with Britain’s faster progress. Thus ...”

“... policy concern and was seen as not only un-British, but as a state security concern. In 2015 David Cameron called on institutions to devise their own ‘sensible rules’ about face veils, and Michael Wilshaw, the head of Ofsted, promised that schools would take a firm lead. He declared that ‘our liberal West values’ must be protected and added that ...”

“... a psychopathic hymn.’ The following year, however, at the height of the moral panic surrounding David Cronenberg’s adaptation of the novel (‘BAN THIS CAR CRASH SEX FILM,’ the Daily Mail suggested), he changed his mind again. ‘It has to be a cautionary tale,’ he said during a discussion with Cronenberg at the BFI. ‘If not, it’s a psychopathic ...”