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“... Vietnamese were essentially aggressive and imperialist. But what could he do about it, without a strong government backed by a united country, ready to use force? Kissinger believed that given the relations between China and Soviet Russia, the Americans’ role in establishing the balance of power gave them a certain advantage, but how long would it be ...”

“... I tried some yellow stain on a small patch and this turned the wall a vibrant green, too strong I’m sure for many people but for me ideal, so that’s how I did the whole room. The study next door I did differently using water-based stains and as the walls here were lime plaster too I painted them in a mixture of umber and orange, yellow and ...”

“... about made in the programme, but what is more noticeable is how ex-grammar school boys like Roy Strong are sentimental over their teachers, which ought to be sympathetic did not the camera go in vampire-like to catch the tears.Maybe my parents were just undemonstrative as I remember nothing comparable to the pride of the parents of Neil Kinnock, for ...”

“... could never be so precise that there were no ways around them if the institutions felt they had a strong incentive to do it … We in the UK were reasonably conservative on lots of different issues, but the Americans were kind of convinced about the … correctness of their bankers’ own assessments of risk … it was kind of low-level regulatory capture ...”

“... unusual in that. But how was his work to be classified? It had to be granted that there were strong romantic elements in Proust; his attitudes to love and friendship, art and history, not to speak of duchesses, spoke of them. But in the ruthless consistency of its philosophy, structure and development in handling these ingredients, A la recherche as a ...”

“... Government. Unless I am authorised to close my eyes to the opium and salt traffic, and without strong Central Government backing, I think it will be useless and dangerous to try to do anything. I would be grateful for a word of semi-official instruction in regard to this.’ He was tersely told to look away. Even contraband that was less high-voltage was ...”

“... whose ambitions were so wide-ranging, seemed odd), came up with the idea that his painting was strong because it stayed so relentlessly on the surface of things. Particularly human things; particularly faces. The word ‘distance’ crops up in early poems and commentary – not much is said about it, but it seems to be claimed as a quality specific to ...”

“... into a volunteer job coffining dead bodies for weeks. And that experience naturally had a strong effect on me.’ The father in the novel flees Belfast for the safety of Dublin with all the family except Gavin, but not before he has a sudden, crude and unconvincing change of heart: ‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The German jackboot ...”

“... may be most surprising to economists. Piketty tells it explicitly to correct the optimistic theory Simon Kuznets proposed in 1955, which was widely accepted in the profession, that inequality lessens as economies mature. If Piketty is correct, the extremes of poverty and wealth seen in 19th-century Europe, far from being growing pains, reflect the capitalist ...”

“... from the Odyssey to Virginia Woolf, whose route included Ammianus, Gregory of Tours, Saint-Simon, historians and memorialists along with poets and novelists. Literature thus both preceded history in Ginzburg’s cursus, and has always thereafter lain adjacent to it. There is a long tradition of the practice of history as a branch of literature, but ...”

“... a language with roots reaching deep into the history of French prose from Montaigne through Saint-Simon and La Rochefoucauld to Chateaubriand (there is, for instance, scarcely a Proustian maxim that one can read without hearing the tone and rhythm of the I7th-century moralistes). This sense of the text gaining sustenance from the rich soil of the French ...”

“... Swept away by Hellman’s memoirs in high school – she regards the older woman as ‘brave and strong and full of noble ideals’ – she forms a desperate wish to meet her. She writes her a letter, asking if she can work for her for the summer, and to her amazement Hellman accepts the offer. All then is giddy alacrity. Like Jane Eyre setting off for ...”

“... never engaged in such acts of militancy, the experience of one of the two white characters has strong echoes of her own: ‘She would not have been here if she had not found her own re-education, after the school where she had sung for God to save white South Africa.’ Placing the tale of the terrorists in tandem with that of an escaped baboon from a ...”

“... row of public toilets. In the kingdom at large, Wahhabi doctrine is enforced by the five thousand-strong religious police force – known as the mutawaeen – controlled by the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. These religious thugs, institutional descendants of the Ikhwan stormtroopers, patrol cities in expensive white SUVs ...”

“... for a presidency so cynical and void of ideas. Barre or Rocard, admired by the Fondation Saint-Simon, would have been preferable.Behind this disaffection, however, lay a deeper doubt about the direction that French public life was taking. Already by the late 1980s, Furet had started to express reservations about the discourse of human rights that was ...”