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“... assessment of the impact of the American president’s decision to authorise the CIA, his private army, to use ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ on people captured or put in its custody. On the first subject, Grey is extremely informative, if not always as smart as he seems. On the second, his reluctance to condemn the CIA outright leaves a nasty taste ...”

“... into thinking they might get seriously hurt, as happened to England at the hands of Mitchell Johnson during the traumatic tour of Australia in 2013-14 (Jonathan Trott, who left the tour early, called Johnson ‘my executioner’). Spinners can’t do that. But they can scare batsmen into thinking they may end up ...”

“... to a series of guards and found my way to my office. I discovered that I was sharing it with Ken Johnson, whom I had known since graduate school. He had written a first-rate thesis and had been kept on as a post doc in the department. He was scheduled to go to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen in the autumn. It soon became clear that no one had any work ...”

“... a dangerous job without sanction, but that enforcing that right was tortuous.On 23 March, Boris Johnson announced a lockdown. ‘Travelling to and from work’ was permitted, he said, ‘but only where this is absolutely necessary and cannot be done from home.’ Lawyers were immediately inundated with requests for clarification. Did he mean that the work ...”

“... which was in fact written by McGeorge Bundy, later national security adviser to Kennedy and Johnson, with input and edits from a number of senior officials intimately involved with the Manhattan Project – was an authoritative counterattack, and it was entirely successful. The message that the bomb had saved a million American lives, in the words of ...”

“... sitting on it was searing pain. Adding to the discomfort, Charlie kept subtly shoving me, until my arm was fully extended to reach the Bakelite knob on top of the gear stick, my left hip pressed into the door, and he was at the wheel. Michael broke his silence and said: ‘I found out a couple of days ago I’m one of the six finalists to design a memorial for ...”

“... this way and that, losing more leaves with every swoop, and branches were torn away. Later I found arms of eucalyptus trees in the corral, red sap, like blood, at the severed places . . . We seemed to be watching a big fire whose flames were yellow instead of red, and it was consuming our land while we looked helplessly down. Luckily, the Santa Ana abates ...”

“... The historical precedents for such a campaign are hardly inspiring. Never since the Jacobite army reached as far south as Derby during the ’45 Rising has the British establishment been so reduced to such an extraordinary and risible state of panic. It seems to me that there are only two possibilities which can restore stable amity between the ...”

“... to do his bidding and reverse the result of the election it would have taken a monumental strong-arm operation of persuasion and coercion, the sort to make even Lyndon Johnson quail. Instead, he threw the case to people who didn’t even know the phone numbers of the people they needed to call. It really was one of those ...”

“... and using any form of written communication at all is rank idiocy. Long before Freud, Samuel Johnson suggested that the impression of artless intimacy given by letters could be a sham. ‘There is indeed no transaction which offers stronger temptations to fallacy and sophistication than epistolary intercourse … A friendly letter is a calm and ...”

“... Churchill. One may disapprove of spin, but there are limits. Balfour’s teacher at Eton, William Johnson, described him as ‘fearless, resolved and negligently great’. The sting is in the ‘negligently’; Johnson, author of the ‘Eton Boating Song’, was also the author of the famous and equally sharp judgment on ...”

“... so much the first over, as a gentle limbering up, a few balls off the wicket to see whether the arm will still go over.’ It is written, like most of those that follow, on a Sunday from the farmhouse near Henley-on-Thames where the publisher retreats at weekends from Soho Square to be with his family and occasionally to mow the lawn, but above all to ...”

“... of the vote share. It is a remarkable trajectory, though not entirely of Starmer’s own making. Johnson’s venality led him to disaster; Sunak flounders, unable to get a grip on the inflationary crisis and presiding over a fractious party dominated by its lunatic fringe. Save for a clutch of showily cruel laws – against protest and migration – the ...”

“... ally it had solemnly sworn to defend. ‘If we are driven from the field in Vietnam,’ President Johnson had pledged in July 1965, ‘then no nation can ever have the same confidence in American promises or American protection. We will stand in Vietnam.’ Uncomfortable precedents indeed for America’s allies in a new open-ended crusade against another ...”

“... busy. Nonetheless, I asked for her when I thought she might be free. In the meantime, my left arm felt like a Francis Bacon painting. The CT scanners must have thought I was someone who liked making a racket. When they stuck the needle into me, I started to yelp. I yelped my way through the little tunnel as my insides were scanned. I yelped as the scan ...”