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“... sacked, but it would be rash of the prime minister to wait for the electorate to sack him: Gordon Brown wouldn’t be the only disappointed person were Tony Blair to be succeeded by Michael Howard. Caracalla was succeeded by Macrinus, a co-conspirator of Martialis, the man who did the actual stabbing and was shortly afterwards caught and ...”

“... Britain’s Labour Party, which had spurned at least three opportunities to replace Gordon Brown with someone more palatable, smelled of exhaustion. Laws describes the various meetings that took place in the days following the election between the Lib Dem negotiating team and its Labour counterparts, to see if they could thrash out a deal. On the ...”

“... things, the phone went. It was Jason Jenson, known to the police as Wet-Dog, his old friend from Brown, former drug-pusher, cat-burglar, mail fraudster and insurance scam artist, one-time inmate of Lorton penitentiary, now a computer whizz kid with EkaSystems Inc, and earning at least half a million a year . . . Alas, much of Zadie Smith’s second novel ...”

“... shoot me or hang me or cheat me and try to stop me because they do believe in race, because of my brown skin, curly hair, wide nose and slave ancestors. But that’s just the way it is. There is an element of arrogance here. Our narrator is after all a literature professor as well as a novelist. We can’t exactly disbelieve in mistaken ideas if they get ...”

“... for the Roman imperial hauteur of his manner), who answered to the British General Sir Harold Alexander, who answered to Winston Churchill. The whole Allied campaign in Italy – later criticised as the most irrelevant and most incompetently wasteful of human lives in the Second World War – was Churchill’s brainchild, insisted on in the face of deep ...”

“... revolt, was commander of the Corps des Pages for twenty-five years, and presided late in life over Alexander II’s Council of Ministers; his grandfather, Count Nicholas, described by Lord Salisbury as ‘an amusing, joking man without regard for the truth’, negotiated the treaty which concluded the Russo-Turkish War and, as ...”

“... On 24 January, a Tuesday, Mr Cedric Brown, chief executive of British Gas, testified before the House of Commons Committee on Employment on the subject of his pay, which is £475,000 a year. In the course of a brisk and competitive exchange with MPs, he showed emotion at only one point, when he said this: I started at the bottom ...”

“... on the doorstep (a cycling accident, David claimed). The same chequered lino is there, the same brown curtains; the jigsaw my grandmother was in the middle of when she died is still out on the table, dusty and half-assembled. On the wall in the corridor hangs the granddaughter clock she left me and that I’ve never seen. David has trouble looking you in ...”

“... colours of a bruise as it appears and disappears: black to purple to blue to clotted burgundy to brown to mustard yellow. I had several collections of near-identical garments: two yellow skirts, four black skirts, three stripy tops, three pairs of scuffed black ballet flats, and a grey cardigan I wanted to lose. Did I think I was building a style or was I ...”

“... to help poor children by ending their entitlement to even minimal welfare support. Although Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein twice call Clinton a Republican president, even the view that he has signed the Contract with America does not go far enough for them. Neither Reagan nor Gingrich, in their view, did much to disturb Washington politics; the ...”

“... of philosophy that developed in the Hellenistic period, the period in which, after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, Greek culture adapted itself to existing in the large and loosely organised states that took the place of the independent city-states in which most Greek life had gone on in the Classical period. These schools continued to develop ...”

“... from Fleet Headquarters at Northwood. Now we find the submarine commander, Christopher Wreford-Brown DSO, saying in Our Falklands War: We were tasked to look for and find the General Belgrano Group. It was reported to consist of the cruiser and escorts. We located her on our passive sonar and sighted her visually early in the afternoon of 1 May. We took ...”

“... King Wenceslas’ (by J.M. Neale), followed by ‘Once in royal David’s city’ (Mrs Alexander); ‘All things bright and beautiful’ (also Mrs Alexander) is less familiar than it used to be, but was once possibly the best known of all. The most famous American poem of the Victorian age is ‘Away in a ...”

“... shape of ‘John Cabal’ (Raymond Massey in Bernal-like make-up), appeared as the protagonist in Alexander Korda’s 1936 film of H.G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come. And, though he was living proof that there is no basic division between art and science, nobody in the suspect culture of science was a more obvious target for the sour provincialism of ...”

“... in Edinburgh. Even then Labour could have reasserted control. In 2008, its then leader, Wendy Alexander, tried to push the SNP into calling an independence referendum – ‘Bring it on,’ she said – but she was slapped down by Gordon Brown, under the advice of Alexander’s ...”