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“... of Nations. But there was always a difficult undertow. Among de Valera’s greatest supporters was Robert Briscoe, a Jew who later became Lord Mayor of Dublin (as did his son Ben Briscoe), but he was never a minister in any Fianna Fáil government because of what Keogh calls ‘an undercurrent of hostility towards Jews in the country which even de Valera ...”

“... the fancy of generations of historians. There was one notable exception among the scholars: Robert Tucker put a dashing young revolutionary – someone who might have stepped out of the Baader-Meinhof Group or the Weathermen – on the cover of Stalin as Revolutionary (1973). But the ‘grey blur’ remained, no doubt partly in reaction against ...”

“... to him. This enthralling new account of Sorge, by the veteran British journalist and old Asia hand Robert Whymant, confirms what I had long suspected: Sorge and Philby were psychic twins, two textbook examples of the rare species we might call Homo undercoverus – those who find the dull, unclassified lives that the rest of us lead simply not (Sorge ...”

“... afternoon, with its atmosphere of electioneering and death, brings to mind the insistent taps of Robert Lowell’s ‘For the Union Dead’: The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year – wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns. Senator John Forbes Kerry, the nominee, didn’t spring ...”

“... Robert Stone​ was the feral child of American literature. He arrived in the world with no one to explain or defend him, except his mother, Gladys. About her we know only stray bits of personal history. The chief evidence that Stone’s father existed is the fact of Stone himself. All other claims – that he was a railroad detective, was a Greek or a Jew, had been killed by a bomb in Shanghai in 1937, even that his given name was Homer – are hearsay, most of them floated by Gladys one day, taken back the next ...”

“... Donald’s mother, Elena, now had to address her letters to Germany. As the Austrian postal service no longer existed, letters posted from the new territory of Ostmark (‘Eastern March’) had to use German stamps, and there now being no Austrian currency, these had to be purchased in German Reichspfennige. The stamp issued in April 1938 to celebrate ...”

“... jobs and exciting new industries’; forging alliances with social media entrepreneurs in the service of ‘21st-century statecraft’; imposing no-fly zones and sanctions that will isolate ‘extremists’ in Arab states; ‘empowering the moderates’ in ‘civil society’ who will bring those states into line with US policy. These conventional ...”

“... political conservatism (symbolised in the open shop), and thinly-veiled racism, all put to the service of boosterism and oligarchy’. Lummis was an enthusiast for South-West archaeology: indeed the cultural/geographical ascription ‘the South-West’ started with him, as did the museum of that name in Highland Park now under threat from the city’s ...”

“... The claims for expression by lesser people, particularly by those in the dependent position of service, and of course all women, could usually be ignored by those in positions of independence or power. The society so eager to develop intellectually was a very narrow part of the whole. The Scottish school of historians, of whom both Adam Smith and David ...”

“... Afew​ months ago I attended Sunday service at the Chapel of Faith Ministries in the main hall of a primary school in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. The pastor, Prince Yormie Johnson, became a celebrity of sorts in the early 1990s when he filmed his execution of the country’s president in the first months of what would turn out to be a brutal 14-year civil war ...”

“... table in 1604 were linked to William Byrd.1 The most powerful, the great Protestant statesman Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, was the dedicatee of one of Byrd’s last and most haunting keyboard ensembles of pavan and galliard, so popular that they were still admired and adapted through the centuries when most Tudor music was relegated to the archives.2 ...”

“... him the opportunity to exercise his unstoppable curiosity. (Trained as a fighter pilot on National Service in the early 1950s, he was told that he was best suited to flying at night: in daylight he was too often distracted by the view.) He lectured across the faculties in Cambridge in the late 1960s and the 1970s, sat on several official commissions, and wrote ...”

“... in letters to an elder brother, my grandfather, Basil Hastings, who was medically unfit for active service: 23 June 1915 Dear Basil, we went in the trenches for 24 hours on Monday. It was extremely interesting and exciting. They shelled us a bit and threw a few hand-grenades and hand-mortars. We had one casualty. I was firing at a sniper with a periscopic ...”

“... officers were warned about German female agents hiding cameras in their blouses. The Security Service (MI5), on the lookout for spooks in Britain, taught its operatives about the use of lemon juice and semen as secret inks, with talcum powder or perfume as fixatives. The Swedish-born Eva de Bournonville was found to have in her possession cakes of soap ...”

“... of pounds it costs the country in terms of road accidents, premature death, burdens on the health service, family breakdown, suicide, homicide, assault, domestic violence, homelessness and police time. Not to mention all the personal misery. Yet faced by so much destruction and epidemic unhappiness, society displays an amazing degree of alcohol ...”