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“... ago: we wouldn’t even have been able to distinguish a modern digital signal from background white noise. SETI is maintained, nevertheless, in the hope that we will receive transmissions we can recognise as such. The account of SETI in XTL (a zippy acronym for Extra-Terrestrial Life) is more technically detailed, and lacks Jack&Ian’s scepticism. But ...”

“... the novels, they are pastiche Rider Haggard. Typically, a grand coalition of good guys, made up of white hunters, faithful Zulu warriors and simple but lovable Bushmen, does battle with an evil network made up of urban blacks, Russians, and, oddly enough, on one occasion, representatives of the World Council of Churches. Nevertheless, when Van der Post ...”

“... it had been applied to the human race by W.C. Wells in 1813, and extended to other species by Patrick Matthew in 1831. Darwin hoped, however, to do some service to science by bringing these elements together in a single arc of argument, supported by masses of detailed observations. In the event he never completed the ‘big book’, but in 1859 he ...”

“... forces. Soleimani’s assassination has turned Iranian anger back towards the Great Satan. As Patrick Cockburn explains (in the next piece in this issue), Iran’s leaders were astounded by the millions of mourners who turned out in the streets. Thanks to Trump, a regime that had become increasingly estranged from its own people saw extra­ordinary scenes ...”

“... Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July 1979 at the home stadium of the Chicago White Sox baseball team when thousands of disco records were set alight while the crowd chanted ‘Disco sucks, Disco sucks!’ The 1989 edition of the Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music describes disco as ‘a dance fad of the Seventies with a profound and ...”

“... was losing the war to prolong colonial rule and the US was making preparations to assume the white man’s burden. Lansdale’s influence over the government in Saigon and his forays into rural backwaters made him a legendary figure: he is said to be the model for the idealistic if naive spy in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and in William Lederer ...”

“... The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama ...”

“... milieu which nourished this remarkable writer. For instance, Bold mentions that MacDiarmid knew Patrick Geddes, the Edinburgh polymath and pioneer of modern town planning. But no attention is paid to MacDiarmid’s own suggestion that Geddes’s literary magazine the Evergreen inspired the Scottish Chapbook. In the 1890s Geddes had espoused a Scots ...”

“... William Morris’s Middle Ages, it offered if not an innocent then a simpler world, ‘small and white and clean’, the sort of other Eden with which the English and at times the Scots have consoled themselves ever since they became too powerful as nations to be quite easy in their minds. David’s reputation grew steadily from 1950 and she used her initial ...”

“... what it is rather than using the word unglossed. I could find igloowik only in two places: Patrick William Browne’s 1909 history of Labrador and the 1933 Supplement. In ‘deleting’ these items (‘dropping’ might be nearer the mark), was Burchfield banishing words that had earned a rightful place in the OED or was he simply removing ones that ...”

“... a post which brought more prestige than income. Like Tennyson’s despondent father, or the fiery Patrick Brontë, Gabriele Rossetti was a displaced figure. His thwarted ambitions shadowed and deepened the lives of his children. All four took it for granted that they would not be ordinary. It was the children’s responsibility to justify their father’s ...”

“... the number of pests, so far kept in check, was about to reach a critical level: leafhoppers, white flies, various caterpillars, red mites, leaf blight and fungi crippled and killed many of the trees. Expensive fumigation followed; in the end, the company was reduced to picking insects off the trees by hand. The search for pest-resistant stock was ...”

“... powers continued to enjoy over Africa. On Césaire’s death in 2008, the Martinican novelist Patrick Chamoiseau admitted that he ‘never understood why the author of these writings, which had liberated so many warriors in Africa, was not for the independence of Martinique’.Crucially, Césaire and Senghor started out as poets rather than ...”

“... and never wanted to see another book after that.’ All I can say is, he deserved his black and white tiles. He has both autonomy and tact. His translation is full of character, marvellously pointed but in touch with timelessness, relished but without striving for effect. We are in the world of Briggflatts, of ...”

“... Wills calls this ‘Bomb Power’ and claims that it has excited fantasies of omnipotence in the White House and reduced Congress to a spectator. Among the public, it fosters a cult, elevating the president from commander in chief of the military to commander in chief of the nation, enjoining all American citizens to spring smartly to attention and ...”