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“... the ‘Iron Prefect’, a man of undoubted rigour and fortitude, to Palermo, armed with all the powers that a dictatorial regime could provide, and let him loose on thousands of rural cattle rustlers, peasant troublemakers and others, innocent and guilty alike. Hundreds were arrested and held without trial. Others went before courts in mass trials ...”

“... one of Mazarin’s spies, and thereby finds himself caught up in trade wars between the European powers. Specifically, he is hired to find out whether the British, or the Dutch, have overcome the great stumbling block which has so far defeated the French navigators and cartographers – the ability to calculate longitude. There are further eggs to be thrown ...”

“... fashions. The thought that a piece of slipshod, invention-free, self-satisfied garbage like Austin Powers: The Spy who Shagged Me can clean up at the box office while Playtime remains unreleased in the US and all but forgotten in Europe … Well, not even Tati’s work, nor Bellos’s measured and affectionate tribute to it, can reconcile me to the horror of ...”

“... such an on-off affair, so fractious, elusive, splattered with froideurs and reconciliations. Jonathan Parry, a specialist in the 19th century, finds that his fellow historians have taken astonishingly little interest in British tangles in the Middle East in the first half of that century, though the relationship was then at its most intense. In fact, the ...”

“... Trying to make sense​ of Jonathan Lethem’s fiction as a whole is something of a fool’s errand: there is no easily discernible line from the early hipster science fiction to his big-selling detective story Motherless Brooklyn (1999), to his Cobble Hill coming-of-age novel The Fortress of Solitude (2003) to his intricate, ironic New York Buddenbrooks, Dissident Gardens (2013 ...”

“... advertisements in the newspapers and commercial jingles on the radio, and was so taken with the Powers Girls that he resolved, with his customary smile, to follow their advice and never settle for any hair tonic except Kreml’s. But despite his affection for America, Toni knew that he could never abandon his ‘idea of Germany’ – ‘the land of ...”

“... based on his insight into Oedipus’ psychodynamics, rather than his own spiritual, supernatural powers or his better knowledge of the social context. On a more mundane plane, there have long been self-pitying drunks, people who get enraged at imagined slights, people who trip themselves up in romantic quests, and oafish tyrants who destroy their own ...”

“... perhaps the point of doing philosophy is to enable people to lead, so far as it is within their powers, philosophical lives.’ MacIntyre has a conception of the good life for human beings and he is spending his life explicating it, defending it and encouraging others to take it seriously. I am delighted by the brilliance of his thought, I admire the ...”

“... arts, and over a period of twenty years he had won himself a battery of quasi-monarchical powers throughout the Dutch provinces. He thanked God for sending the wind that sped him and 15,000 Dutch soldiers to Torbay on the auspicious date of 5 November; but he also took care to smooth the path of providence by means of a web of alliances with dissident ...”

“... pact? Not nice, but perhaps it means we shan’t be having to fight an alliance of three Fascist powers, including Franco’s Spain. Churchill as prime minister? All very well, but some of us remember the Dardanelles – and besides, look at the people around him! To be sure, reading the newspapers of the time can have something of the same effect, as is ...”

“... territorial ambition. In 1934 the chiefs of staff warned that Britain could not fight these three powers simultaneously and would have to make difficult defence choices. In 1935 a cautious rearmament programme began, but so did the appeasement of Mussolini’s aggression towards Abyssinia. Public opinion accepted Hitler’s remilitarisation of the Rhineland ...”

“... that their campaign in response to the Armenian atrocities of 1894-96 was an invitation to other powers to try once more to carve up the Ottoman Empire. His main concern was to educate Liberals to accept the reality of British power in the Nile valley and Eastern Africa. The Gladstonians had never confronted the consequences of their own occupation of Egypt ...”

“... no reason, as he put it in the Discourse on Method in 1637, to think that the human body had any powers beyond those of the marvellous ‘self-moving machines or automata that can be made by human ingenuity’. The late treatise on the Passions rests entirely on the assumption that the body is a ‘machine’. Even the truculent hero of the Meditations will ...”

“... liberation grew within the former British, French and Dutch colonies in Asia. While the European powers sought to regain control over colonies that had fallen under Japanese occupation during the war, Washington saw things through the lens of the Cold War. Should it support its European allies in resisting change or get on board with the anticolonial ...”

“... long road to nation-building. Kazakhstan was the last of the 15 republics to declare independence. Jonathan Aitken is an unlikely candidate to write a book on this subject. Since emerging from prison after his conviction for perjury in 1999 he has written books about himself and other public figures who fell from grace: Richard Nixon, his former special ...”