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“... The Peter Wright trial in Australia has recently brought out the full absurdity of this, with Sir Robert Armstrong attempting at one point to suggest that the very existence of MI5 and MI6 (let alone the identity of their directors) was a secret which could neither be confirmed nor denied. There is no other state in the world which behaves like this and ...”

“... to achieve real fame. Others became successful writers with French names: Elsa Triolet, born Ella Kagan; and Henri Troyat, born Lev Tarasov. Troyat adopted the pseudonym at the suggestion of his editor, and went on to become the first Russian to be elected to the Académie Française. But many more writers were unwilling, or unable, to abandon their original ...”

“... Institute of Advanced Study as an assistant to John von Neumann. A chance meeting with Robert Oppenheimer led to an invitation to talk about the Zipf-Mandelbrot law at the Institute. The talk fell flat, people fell asleep, and a distinguished historian of mathematics stood up and declared he hadn’t understood a word. Mandelbrot was paralysed, but ...”

“... the evening. The former congresswoman chastised me for being insufficiently read in the works of Robert Caro. We watched each other’s bags in the line to be re-ticketed and I tried to help her with the airline app on her phone. ‘I used to chair committees and have an entire staff to do these things for me,’ she said. The last flight to Chicago left ...”

“... he has been more recently for the founders of American neoconservatism, the Yale classicist Donald Kagan and his sons Robert and Frederick, both of whom were influential in promoting the second Iraq War. And yet for the Founding Fathers of the United States, Hamilton and Madison in particular, Pericles was a warmongering ...”

“... has become a common coin of complacency. As the countdown to Iraq proceeded, the British diplomat Robert Cooper, special adviser on security to Blair, and later to Prodi as head of the Commission, explained the merits of empire to readers of Prospect. ‘A system in which the strong protect the weak, in which the efficient and well-governed export stability ...”