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“... and walk down the muddy lane to the clapper bridge. There are sheep and lambs everywhere and the beck is very full, gliding wickedly between the stones before flattening out over the fields. It’s a perfect scene and R. is just saying how we must try and keep it in mind next week (when I have to go into hospital) when deep in the water comes the spectral ...”

“... be very high. So, predictably enough, it has been with the United Nations. Readers approaching James Traub’s and Stanley Meisler’s books thus have reason to expect the worst. In some ways the expectation is amply fulfilled, but in others the two books – each by a journalist – cast more light on the UN than is normally allowed to fall on it. The ...”

“... carriages began to be replaced with sliding doors. The iconic Underground map, designed by Harry Beck, an electrical draughtsman, in imitation of a circuit diagram (he was paid only ten guineas for his masterwork) was taken up in 1932. By 1937, when the sole Tube line to go deep into South London was renamed the Northern Line, the Underground was, in ...”

“... as Gide liked to say, and we may have to raise some questions when someone like Henry James comes along and offers to codify its new ‘laws’ in doctrines like ‘point of view’. Even though he is virtually absent from this book, for reasons I will come to, Faulkner offered his own useful tripartite formula for what the novelist’s practice ...”

“... whole populations of people doing difficult and socially useful tasks can find themselves at the beck and call of a smaller group whose expertise consists chiefly in setting measurable targets and enforcing a system of penalties and rewards: managers tell doctors what they should be doing, managers tell teachers what they should be doing, managers tell ...”

“... and by the public. And it was feared. Harold Wilson’s 1964-70 and 1974-76 Governments and James Callaghan’s 1976-79 Administration spent more time cajoling, ‘standing up to’, browbeating, placating and schmoozing with union leaders than with any other group. Robert Taylor’s close account of the TUC has in it some wonderfully revealing passages ...”

“... the prelude to far more ambitious plans, the so-called Round 3 wind farms like Dogger Bank Creyke Beck, a staggeringly grandiose project to plant turbines in the middle of the North Sea over an area almost three times the size of the Isle of Wight, 130 miles north-east of the mouth of the Humber, producing about as much electricity as a mid-sized nuclear ...”

“... politics’ after the collapse of the Soviet Union; we live in what the German sociologist Ulrich Beck calls a post-military state. We have also woven about us a ‘human rights regime’ which has, as Held & Co put it, entrenched in international law the notion that a legitimate political power must be, on the one hand, a form of political power that is ...”

“... grey-headed with bright yellow breasts, which seem to be nesting in the creeper rather than by the beck, which is what the bird book says they should be doing. Chrissie opposite says she has a couple of yellow wagtails in her garden, but she is much nearer the water. Not sure how common grey wagtails are, I knock on Timmy Hutchinson (Timmy the Twitcher)’s ...”

“... a film with the Rothschilds’ money’, because he’d cast Stéphane, the daughter of Baron James-Henri de Rothschild.) On the last day of the shoot, Vercors’s wife returned home early and complained that the German officer had shown more respect for their house than the film crew had. ‘But Madame,’ Melville replied, ‘the German wasn’t making ...”