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“... royalty.When success threatened any target for the Super Sewer, launched by Tideway in 2015, Boris Johnson let it be known that he was available, film crew on standby, to take the plaudits. Whatever his manifold faults, the man was a master of credit harvesting, his hair tossing and his huff-and-puff bluster leavened with Carry On jokes: ‘Fantastic, amazing ...”

“... of local universities through huge budget cuts. The city was horribly gerrymandered in the 2010s. Paul Ryan, former Speaker of the House of Representatives and a native of Janesville, Wisconsin, acted as a wrecking ball on social care in the area and was a friend to people who believe that tax cuts are evidence of enlightenment. The Democrats had grown ...”

“... ambition that stamped the Frühromantik – the ambience of the Schlegels, Novalis, Jean Paul, Tieck, Fichte, Schleiermacher, with Hölderlin and Kleist off-stage – made it an explosive force far beyond the sentimental reach of the Lake Poets or the vaticinations of Hugo: a starburst that could never be repeated or forgotten, as its consequences ...”

“... you’re the one trying to hold it together or the one who’s trying to prise the sides apart.Paul Gilroy – one of Hall’s many illustrious former students – suspects it was frustration with New Labour, and what it did to left politics, that led Hall in the 1990s to spend more and more time working on ‘less depressing’ Black Arts projects ...”

“... vigorously in California for Barry Goldwater’s doomed presidential campaign against Lyndon Johnson. Several times a day, Reagan gave the same speech he had been making for years. The substance was reactionary boilerplate: casting off the shackles of government regulation, rolling back the Soviet Union, freeing the enslaved populations of Eastern ...”

“... could not permit my mind to be profaned by such intellectual whorishness’) and wrote an essay on Paul Valéry instead. ‘To know you is a calamity,’ one of his classmates told him.Schwartz would sequester himself in his room, keen to ‘impress the boys with his habit of solitude and concentration of study’. His letters to Julian Sawyer, his only close ...”

“... contract.The Covid pandemic accelerated Palantir’s advance in the UK. In August 2019, Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings had an off-the-books meeting with Thiel in Downing Street. Six months later, Palantir was one of the thirty-odd tech companies invited to Downing Street and asked to aid the national pandemic response. Palantir, with support from ...”

“... as Ada and Phyllis can carry them. ‘We should leave no stone unturned or unfracked,’ Boris Johnson said, ‘in the cause of keeping the lights on in London.’ The mania​ for boreholes reminded me of a cautionary tale by Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘When the World Screamed’. Doyle’s crazed superman scientist, Professor Challenger, who would now be seen ...”

“... of crimes a year, including burglaries and some assaults.Harper gives the example of Bethany and Paul Eaton, whose house in Chislehurst, South-East London, was burgled while they were on holiday in 2019. When a neighbour spotted the break-in and called the police, the call handler said that since the neighbour hadn’t made an appointment, officers ...”

“... by Kim Stanley Robinson in his novel Forty Signs of Rain – begins with the Scientists for Johnson Campaign, run by a group of eminent scientists who were worried about Barry Goldwater’s apparent eagerness to wage nuclear war. Their campaign had a considerable impact, and when Richard Nixon got to the White House four years later he was convinced ...”

“... counterpart; John Milton, represented by Paradise Lost; William Sherlock, the theologian; and Paul de Rapin, author of the bestselling History of England, published in the 1720s.Peering at the scans, I was able to make out several more lines: originally, as many as twenty of the spines may have been inscribed. And then, one discovery abruptly transformed ...”

“... kettles in a room on the first floor of the Post Office’s St Martin’s-le-Grand depot, near St Paul’s Cathedral. The existence of the GPO’s Special Investigations Unit, which had a facility in every major sorting office in the country, was highly classified, but, like Congreve’s secret, it was whispered everywhere (the postman and future home ...”

“... unhappiest real-life casualty until his wives Ruth, Kay and Eden. His first marriage, to Ruth Johnson, took a long time to unravel. She had fallen in love with his quickness. Closer up, Groucho resembled his on-stage character in ways she found disturbing. He could say ‘I want to be alone,’ in a vaguely Slavic basso profundo fine-tuned for ...”

“... neck. He was a small man with a folksy didacticism and a strong resemblance to the late magician Paul Daniels. He sat at the head of a long table. In front of him was a copy of the daily Rzeczpospolita with a picture of Theresa May on the front page. It was mid-January and May had just made her speech declaring that Britain, as part of leaving the ...”