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“... of day begin to drowse. The rookeries are emptying, and their birds of prey making wing to the West End. Dollymops, cracksmen and gonophs are on the prowl. Susan (up from Mrs Sucksby’s kitchen in the Borough) and Caroline (one of Mrs Castaway’s girls in St Giles) will hunt together tonight. Caroline is on the game, an alley-cat who’ll lift her ...”

“... of New York Harbor, the ‘windowed cliffs’ of lower Manhattan brilliantly alight when you bank west on the approach to Newark at night. During the day you can see the cloverleafs, storage tanks and freight yards, the shopping centres and clusters of homes. Heading over the western edge of Jersey, you pass over the Great Swamp and the headwaters of the ...”

“... only three days, he escaped from a lawyer’s office in New Brunswick at the age of 17 and headed west to Calgary, where he ran a bowling alley. There, in Williams’s words, he learned ‘knowledge of how a grandee looked and behaved, and more to the immediate point, of the advantages of insider information as a sure way of making money’. Soon he was ...”

“... is more direct: ‘Erected to the memory of the heroes … Stephen Decatur Parish, James West Hadnot, Sidney Harris, who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy, April 13, 1873.’ When EJI arrived in Montgomery there were more than fifty memorials of one sort or another to the glories of the Confederacy. They included a gold star on the ...”

“... than about what to do once they had. Lenin’s success and the subsequent failures to the west, especially in Germany, exercised them further, for their standard suppositions were turned upside down. Capitalism might not be a necessary condition of socialism at all. Indeed, it might impede it. Moreover, the new Soviet state had its own vertiginous ...”

“... unawares; it took one division six weeks to get from a base in eastern Iran to the theatre in the west. A few days after he heard about the invasion, Hossein Kharrazi commandeered two buses and took his men to Ahwaz. They were not members of the regular Army, but had joined a volunteer corps called the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) which Khomeini ...”

“... and unhappy, and was to end in divorce during the war, there is no evidence that it foundered on Anthony Powell’s law that envy rather than jealousy is the enemy of wedlock. Gumilev, who was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1921, was a highly peculiar but a generous man. His wife, who remarried twice, was not an easy woman. She was naturally grand. Tsvetaeva, who ...”

“... to murder Trotsky in Mexico, even though it was obvious that Trotskyism held little appeal for the West, while the domestic arm of the OGPU stamped out even the suggestion of support for Trotsky at home. Zionism – that is, Jews – became a major enemy in the latter years of Stalin’s reign, and a KGB purged of its Jewish members (the prohibition remains to ...”

“... with all this: most of it is both familiar and dated, like the Yellow Peril or the Decline of the West. Symons claims that Lewis was prophetically right about the demise of the family, unisex, and the immense growth of what Lewis called ‘associational life’, controlled by the internationals and the press. He was, however, ‘dramatically wrong’ about ...”

“... superstition and intolerance.In March 1706, in the midst of the War of the Spanish Succession, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, wrote excitedly to the Swiss biblical scholar Jean Le Clerc. ‘There is,’ he declared, ‘a mighty light which spreads itself over the world, especially in those two free nations of England and Holland, upon ...”

“... necessities of the body.’ The transition to bodily inhibition took place quite slowly, however: Anthony Wood complained that when Charles II’s courtiers left Oxford, they also left ‘their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal-houses, cellars’. True civility was the property of the city. ‘Since classical times,’ Thomas ...”

“... in 1958. Worst of all was the fact that he had chosen as his personal assistant his friend Anthony Blunt, to whom he confided the most sensitive tasks of all. What this meant was that absolutely everything of the slightest importance was going straight from Liddell’s desk to Beria and Stalin. Would the Americans ever trust the British again? Could ...”

“... recovered. ‘I am favourably impressed with General Wavell in many ways,’ Churchill wrote to Anthony Eden, ‘but I do not feel in him that sense of mental vigour and resolve to overcome obstacles, which is indispensable to successful war.’ John Colville, Churchill’s secretary, recorded that ‘Churchill tried his hardest to elicit the general’s ...”

“... an admirer of German Romanticism and 17th-century painting, a reimaginer of such figures as Anthony Blunt and Paul de Man, and a frequent raider of mathematics and cosmology, Banville is – no question – one of the fancy boys, sometimes verging on being a clever-clever darling. (‘As one of your most darkly glowing luminants has observed’ is the ...”

“... continuity: ‘A biography of Ho Chi Minh.’ Did I read French? No. Vietnamese? No. ‘Well,’ Anthony Blond said thoughtfully, ‘you better start a crash course in French straight away and now let’s go back to my office and send Ho a telegram.’ We did. A month later there was an excited call from Blond. ‘Come to the office immediately. A ...”