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“... in one of Netflix’s numberless true crime productions (viz, a reconstructed FBI interview with Charles Manson, peddling his ‘blame it on the Beatles’ spiel); a ‘previously unseen’ Beatles-at-home photo from 1963; a ‘previously unseen’ Beatles photo at Shea Stadium from 1965; a hip young mixadelic band citing ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ as ...”

“... be infested with moles. The business schools have been covering the ground with Malcolm Bradbury, Martin Wiener and Correlli Barnett. Their audit of the nation is complete. Confirming old suspicions about the degeneracy of the sociology department, it has also brought out a newer truth about English culture and its responsibility for the decline of the ...”

“... 1949. She makes a cameo as the magazine’s ‘resident Circe’ in a biography of the cartoonist Charles Addams; legend tells that she was Truman Capote’s inspiration for Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Was it the clothes? As a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, Brennan wore white gloves to the office, and her vintage wardrobe and showy ...”

“... a household name, and while the children entering that school can surely tell you something about Martin Luther King Jr, and probably about Malcolm X too, I wonder what they know of the man for whom their school is named. The Columbia undergraduates up the street, who read W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk in the Plato-to-Arendt ‘great ...”

“... of power has been eliminated. He even considers this question – the question raised by Habermas, Charles Taylor and Walzer – ‘silly’. In his view, Foucault’s real difficulty lay in the fact that the ‘strategic’ analysis of power relations did not allow him to answer a different question: how can one resist force? If you are powerless, you are not ...”

“... running as they do from Titian’s great equestrian portrait of Philip IV’s great-grandfather Charles V to the scenes from the myth of Pandora represented on the ceiling. Comparisons with the earlier study are inevitable, and they are not to Orso’s advantage. His work still smells of the doctoral thesis it once was – painstaking and thorough, but ...”

“... Scott was ‘a tame and feeble writer’. Unluckily, in the same article, an Irish MP – Richard Martin – was twitted as a ‘jackass’: he wrote instantly to William Blackwood, threatening legal action and demanding that the article’s author be unmasked. A distraught Wilson took to his bed and snivelled to Blackwood: ‘To own that article is for a ...”

“... Roman presence in the Lowlands. Robert Sibbald, geographer royal for the kingdom of Scotland under Charles II, suggested that the barrier between civilisation and barbarity was not the Picts’ Wall but Graham’s Dyke (the later turf rampart, now known as the Antonine Wall, built 100 miles north, between the Clyde and the Forth). Sibbald argued in his ...”

“... in Britain. The line soon went public. Addressing an America First rally in Des Moines, Iowa, Charles Lindbergh maintained that the ‘greatest danger to this country’ lay in Jewish ‘ownership of and influence on our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government’. The Republican Senator from North Dakota, Gerald Nye, echoed Lindbergh’s ...”

“... time.’ Patrick is the damaged, scornful victim of his father, David Melrose, ‘descended from Charles II through a prostitute’. Centuries of damp arrest have created the monstrous David: ‘The expression that men feel entitled to wear when they stare out of a cold English drawing-room onto their land had grown stubborn over five centuries and perfected ...”

“... on religion is overwhelmingly about the parliamentary debates in the 1880s on whether the atheist Charles Bradlaugh should be allowed to sit in Parliament without taking the Christian oath. A chapter on women is mostly about W.T. Stead’s publicity-seeking campaigns on prostitution. A chapter called ‘Ireland’ is limited to the politics of Gladstone and ...”

“... times, with uneven films such as Easy Rider; or for the murders committed in 1969 by followers of Charles Manson. Those could be seen as political – one of the motivations was to provoke a race war – but the horrifying character of Manson and the celebrity of some of the victims were what caught most people’s attention. The fascination with the episode ...”

“... Martin Chuzzlewit, in the Dickens novel, crosses the Atlantic in a packet boat. When it reaches New York, newsboys come aboard shouting out the latest in their papers: the New York Sewer, the Stabber, the Plunderer and so on. ‘Here’s the Sewer’s exposure of the Washington gang,’ one cries, ‘and the Sewer’s exclusive account of a flagrant act of dishonesty committed by the Secretary of State when he was eight years old, now communicated, at a great expense, by his own nurse ...”

“... founding families, are fairly heavy on Kerry’s mother’s side and his kinsman Robert Charles Winthrop was a senator for Massachusetts in 1850. Lowell’s portrait of that society, ‘91 Revere Street’, creaks with patrician relatives and Edwardian furniture, people with large trust funds and profound neuroses, ‘an unspoiled faith in the ...”

“... trade still runs. From a policy point of view, the last word on this should probably be left with Martin Lee, leader of the democratic forces in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council. As he has stressed (I am summarising a conversation in Sydney last year), the British are not going to have to put up with the consequences of their decisions. Most of the present ...”