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“... Arriving in Johannesburg in 1941, Mandela was quickly recruited into the ANC by the remarkable Walter Sisulu, the grandfather of a whole ANC generation. Sisulu (who, at 76, is still in jail and well worth a birthday celebration or two) was the son of a white father who had quickly abandoned his mother, a black washerwoman. He had little education, and had ...”

“... is a German one to steal the secrets of British naval dispositions. Scudder was a good agent, Sir Walter Bullivant of the Secret Service explains, but ‘he had a lot of odd biases, too. Jews, for example, made him see red. Jews and the high finance.’Buchan’s biographers, starting with Janet Adam Smith in 1965, tend to hold up this turnaround as evidence ...”

“... as he was able. Born around 1485, he was a teenager at the turn of the new century. His father, Walter Cromwell alias Smith, was a more or less successful businessman whose brushes with manorial justice were practically routine. His mother’s name may have been Katherine, and her origins can be traced with some close detective work to the Meverell family ...”

“... hatred of orchids and his views on Darwin? Why did he praise Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and not George Eliot?), that we need to focus more accurately. We get precious little of that kind of definition from Kemp. Instead, we are presented with a tiring stream of second-hand generalisations. One of the consequences of Kemp’s recoil from morbus Ruskinianus ...”

“... we move to its equally emblematic ending with the opening of the Métro. This is work inspired by Walter Benjamin, as Prendergast says, whose ‘imprint’ is to be found ‘virtually everywhere in the following pages’. But the influence has been thoroughly assimilated, converted into practice. Benjamin has provided insights and ways of seeing, but above ...”

“... Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci, and a famous Italian ex-Communist, Ignazio Silone. After this, George Orwell is discussed with special attention to The Lion and the Unicorn and Albert Camus in relation to the Algerian war. The following three chapters are devoted to Simone de Beauvoir, Marcuse and Foucault. The last author (and the only live one) is the ...”

“... candidate for Parliament, Lamb thinks Eden was wrong in failing to back sufficiently Gwilym Lloyd George’s determination to put curbs on coloured immigration, particularly from the West Indies. He puts this down to Eden’s unwillingness to spoil his image as a moderate, which presumably accounted also for the failure to press trade-union legislation ...”

“... Now, of course, there is no intrinsic incompatibility between novel-writing and history-writing. Walter Scott was an admirable historian – here indeed lay most of his strength. A case can be made, too, for saying that Flaubert, in L’Education sentimentale, was a better historical thinker – showed a more advanced grasp of historical causation – than ...”

“... to keep financially afloat, ‘Squeeze Play’ revolves around the death of former baseball star, George Chapman. Written by ‘Paul Benjamin’, and narrated in the first person by Max Klein, a private dick, it’s much the best bit of Hand to Mouth. The snappy dialogue and quick-fire clichés sit much more happily in this decent New York yarn than in the ...”

“... 1930s and 1940s by Western diplomats serving in Moscow, including the future American Ambassador, George Kennan, who praised it as the most faithful guide not only to 19th-century Russia, but also to Russia under Stalin. It is a rich source of aphorisms for Russianists and travellers to Russia, who are not likely to disagree with such observations as that ...”

“... loan-jobbers, forestallers and other wartime profiteers accused of ripping off ordinary people. Walter Scott, part of a cavalry troop raised to ensure stability on the home front, the Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons, found his conscience troubled when he was confronted in the line of duty with the looting of a bread shop: ‘Truth to say it was a ...”

“... field, as painting and sculpture were pressured by photography and film, and modernists like Walter Benjamin and László Moholy-Nagy redefined literacy as the ability to read both. For Benjamin, the reproducibility of these media not only shattered the auratic power of the unique work (this was mostly wishful thinking) but, in doing so, opened artistic ...”

“... for a North Sea ferry and postage stamps of Queen Victoria in the shell carriage and King George V as Neptune. Panel 78 charts the rise of Mussolini; Warburg was in Rome in 1929, and witnessed what he called its ‘repaganisation’. The final panel includes a photograph of a hara-kiri ceremony, two late 15th-century depictions of the desecration of ...”

“... travellers because she was a replica of her ill-fated kin, a relic of the lost age of innocence. Walter Lord, who wrote the 1955 classic A Night to Remember, which, as Andrew Wilson says in his wonderful retellings of survivors’ stories, marks the beginning of the modern era of Titanic myth and memory, sailed on her as a boy. (The Olympic had her share of ...”

“... platform for his articles on the breakdown of English civilisation, complete with swipes at Lloyd George and his perfidious controllers, the Northcliffe press, bankers, Prussians and Jews. Converting to his master’s Roman Catholicism, Cecil also adopted his antisemitism, which emerges when he remarks in his rather patronising little book on his brother that ...”