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“... and likes, all of whom he assumes are repelled by his deformity. Shardlake’s first sidekick, Mark Poer, is twittish, something of a Lord Percy to his Blackadder, but represents both the son he’ll never have and a masculine ideal he can’t measure up to. Poer’s face is smooth where Shardlake’s is angular, his hair cropped where Shardlake’s is ...”

“... 2003. In early 2007, he heard about the death in Mosul of a young soldier from California called Mark Daily, who had left behind a statement explaining his reasons for having volunteered to fight. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, Daily had thought hard about a war whose justice he had initially doubted, and eventually felt the call to take ...”

“... of the enshrined practices of the Athenian and Roman republics by Philip of Macedon and Mark Antony (although those of Demosthenes were calls to arms rather than constitutional critiques).There are at least six books now in print with the words ‘Assault on Truth’ in their titles: Oborne’s; Jeffrey Masson’s polemic against the slipperiness of ...”

“... big stuff – the national plan, the new approach, to expand or die’. Industrial production rose by 11 per cent in the year after the pliable Heathcoat Amory’s 1959 election budget – a completely unsustainable gallop. Macmillan’s obsession with expansion and his utter neglect of inflation were of course a reaction to the bitter experience of the ...”

“... the Spectator did not hope for better than ‘tenuous’ relations with any government. My spirits rose when I heard this story. They have been rising ever since. Whatever the Lawson-Wilson mode may be called, there is nothing fogeyish about it. By way of contrast, the pseudo-chivalrous defences of grand people’s privacy rights – the Queen Mum, the man ...”

“... participants displayed, especially in the course of this year. The faster and more steeply prices rose, the more investors had to lose, and consequently, the jumpier they became. Despite the warning signs, investors, analysts and brokers have all been caught off guard. No one seemed to think that a reversal could be so sudden, or that prices in New ...”

“... a powerful mind’. Various candidates have been put forward as possible models for Casaubon – Mark Pattison, with his quick-witted young wife Emilia; old Dr Robert Brabant, who had attracted the young Mary Ann and who repeatedly failed to finish the scholarly projects he began; and the self-absorbed Herbert Spencer. But when asked to identify the ...”

“... and a stenographer was hired to record the conversation. But Hutch was a little drunk when he rose to speak, and the stenographer was not used to his vocabulary or odd juxtapositions. The resulting typescript was a disjointed jumble of ideas about sex, men, women, Wobblies, revolution, love, art, democracy and anarchism that lurched between sharp insights ...”

“... assumptions’, ‘more or less imbued’: whatever the actual history, these phrases bear the mark of very recent times; all were written, in fact, within the last twenty years. The tide of metaphysical and idealist speculation in the humanities is not yet at flood. Within a period of persistent political reaction, and of more specific kinds of political ...”

“... Government, who had contracted the project to Boeing, eventually cancelled the SST as its costs rose, and with most countries still refusing to allow supersonic passenger flights over their territory, the Boeing 747 remains in 1993 the fastest and most cost-effective long-haul airliner. Pan-Am, meanwhile, went bust in 1991 – not least, Irving ...”

“... that matter?), Margaret (of Anjou) as Margareth, and so on. To be translated more than once is the mark of a classic, and automatically makes one wonder how this one is faring after 78 years. How enduring the appeal of its subject-matter remains can be gauged from the chapter-titles: ‘The Passionate Intensity of Life’ (an echo of Yeats, replacing ...”

“... gay sex, out of sight of the law. The association with licence has never quite gone away. In 1963, Mark Birley insisted that his new club, Annabel’s, ‘must smell of exclusivity and sex’. Paula Yates posed naked in the saloon of the Reform Club.The 18th-century business model was to fleece rich young men by overcharging for food and drink. The idea of the ...”

“... hate like brothers’ hate.’ We had heard of Cain and Abel, the first pair of brothers. ‘Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.’ We knew about Jacob and Esau too, and thought Esau entirely in the right. ‘And Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing wherewith his father blessed him.’ These were not encouraging precedents. Despite such ...”

“... At first no bodies are found, so the people are simply missing. Giono uses careful language to mark this mystery (‘must have gone’, ‘disappeared from the face of the earth’) as if it were impolitic to assume or speak of direct violence. Then the bodies are discovered hanging in a tree, and the killer, a certain Monsieur V., is tracked down. The ...”

“... Laughland, Ponting’s lawyer. By not doing this, Michael Heseltine has earned himself a black mark in important Conservative circles, where, when it comes to the leadership stakes, it will be taken into account that he did not behave as an officer and a gentleman should by going along to the Old Bailey to face the music. This is a view I have heard from ...”