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“... An hour earlier, exit polls had shown that his party, Renaissance, and its allies had been routed by the far right in elections for the European Parliament. The dissolution wasn’t a coup in the ordinary sense of the term, though Macron played fast and loose with constitutional conventions (the speaker of the Senate, who ought to have been consulted, was ...”

“... it came to libido, others might prefer to ‘receive’ and ‘retain’ rather than to discharge. By Ackland’s account, Warner belonged to the second category. The lovers (Warner was then 37, Ackland 24) knew that they had embarked on a kind of relationship which, if not exactly unheard of, would take some figuring out. The emotional generosity and sense of ...”

“... to protect the NF’s right of assembly, 700 protesters were arrested, 345 of whom would be charged, 97 police officers and 64 members of the public were reported to have been injured, and one demonstrator, Blair Peach, was killed. Blair Peach’s funeral, 13 June 1979. On 27 May the following year, an inquest jury reached a verdict in ...”

“... Sexists, racists and buffoons … misogynistic shitheads everywhere … If he does manage to be a douche nozzle without breaking the law for four years, we’ll make it through those four years.’ Or consider the message read out to Vice President-elect Mike Pence by the cast of Hamilton after he attended a ...”

“... How should the history of the Jews be written? Ever since the compilation of the Old Testament – a pioneering work of collaborative authorship, sometimes inaccurate and inadequately documented, and biased throughout by teleological distortion – it has been an understandably difficult and daunting task ...”

“... me full in the eye. He is friendly about access but must clear it with his boss, who ‘should be back by 6’. As we talk, the crag leans over us hugely. For a few hours Neil (my youngest son) and I work out at the other end of Gibraltar, on the sun-warmed and flowery tiers of Buffadero Bluff, where I had climbed two ...”

“... to shoot at anything but targets: all game in the kingdom belonged to the Queen and could only be hunted under licence. Bows and arrows, guns and pistols must normally have been kept at home, but every man carried a knife with which to cut his food, and every gentleman a sword. Fights were common, but the law required you, if attacked, to retreat until ...”

“... as a piece of barbarity just as we now look back on torture.’ These confident words were spoken by a member of the 1848 Frankfurt Parliament, which voted amid cheers to abolish capital punishment, except in military law. By the spring of 1849 it had been ended in a score of German states, including Prussia. Like the ...”

“... surviving death but also when we make any ordinary choice in daily life. For whatever people end by thinking after they have studied philosophy and considered the arguments for determinism, there is no doubt that they begin with the conviction that they are genuine originators of their own actions, that when they choose to do them and do them, they could ...”

“... In each hand he clutches another naked human – a ‘sinner’, no doubt – their skin scored by his nails. Nearby, frogs are raping women and lizards are biting at people’s thighs. As Dante was being baptised here seven hundred and forty years ago, his baby eyes might have tried to focus on this scene. Ghastly nightmares, diseased fantasies ... Never ...”

“... that has been gambled away. That something was the prospect of a ‘German century’, ended by what Stern calls a ‘stoppable self-destruction’. The ambiguous promise of Einstein’s German world is evoked in a series of biographical studies, supplemented by several more general essays. The most substantial ...”

“... Wilhelm himself, to whom modesty was always a mysterious idea, would doubtless have been pleased by the thought of a thousand-page doorstopper devoted to his youth. It is unlikely that he would have enjoyed its contents. Prince Friedrich Wilhelm Albert Victor was born in January 1859. He was a breech baby, whose delivery was mishandled ...”

“... is that, in talent and personality, Dalton never quite belonged to the front rank of politics. To be sure, he was a robust and formidable party warhorse – a kind of William Harcourt or Roy Hattersley, say – with enormous energy, considerable administrative drive and a powerful debating style. But he captured no imaginations, lifted no horizons and ...”

“... years later). He was at once in demand with Tauchnitz on the Continent. His articles were bought by the London dailies, the Listener, and Collier’s, his stories by Harper’s. Three of his novels were filmed (one by a remarkable artist, Peter Ustinov). His plays were produced in the ...”

“... As a child I collected butterflies, and I remember being impressed by a comic cartoon which showed another collector, older and more experienced than myself, who had accidentally swallowed a specimen he had been chasing. Later I felt the same sense of incongruity when I read Berkeley’s claim that everything he perceived was really in his mind ...”