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“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... the very top of the pile. Frick had been a senior Bavarian administrator, Ley came from IG Farben, Frank and Goebbels had good university records and ‘would have succeeded in any field or calling’. Hess, Kater notes, would probably have become a professor in Munich, although the author’s earlier remarks about Bavaria ...”

“... German critics; they concentrate rather selectively on minor and largely non-dramatic works. As Frank Trommler says in a sceptical Afterword (to my mind, the most perceptive part of the book), these essays show ‘to what a large degree his work is used as a vehicle for contemporary concerns, to what extent he is cast as a guru for artistic ...”

“... two reasons. First, the Contract was the most completely poll-driven manifesto in modern history. Frank Luntz, the Republican Party’s opinion-meister, ran questions by focus-groups and other poll-fodder until he found topics (like lower taxation) which rang a bell. If the bell rang, the plank went into the platform. If not, not. Most people don’t want a ...”

“... of Fiume demonstrated his total unsuitability for any serious role in government, leaving the field open to Mussolini. Ironically, with the triumph of Fascism in 1922, D’Annunzio went into prolonged decline. Mussolini neutralised him by turning him into a public monument and granting his every whim, however extravagant. He was given a title, Prince of ...”

“... the Cold War and whatever measures Washington decided were necessary to prosecute it, as well as a frank admirer of American capitalism (having made more cautious moves in this direction under the long editorship of Geoffrey Crowther between 1938 and 1956). In 1965, an article proclaimed the US ‘the most internationally responsible country in the ...”

“... by white gravefields containing the remains, among thousands of others, of my great-uncle Frank and Kipling’s son Jack, though who can be sure exactly where they lie? (The identification of Jack’s grave in the cemetery at St Mary’s Advanced Dressing Station is still contested.) Twenty-five years before I went to Loos for the centenary of the ...”

“... up to and including testing, without having a human spy to witness it and tell us about it. He is frank about the numerous instances in which the whole detection apparatus failed, as it did in the first Soviet test of August 1949; the ‘Vela’ explosion in the South Atlantic in September 1979; the detonation by India of several devices, one ...”

“... response to a wound on the communal body. A recent profile in the New Yorker detailed some of the field research she did before she began to write, including two visits to Nigeria.Officials from the Irish Embassy picked her up. Her first ambition was to ‘meet girls who will tell me their story’, she recalled. O’Brien told me that she wanted ‘their ...”

“... details but not very interested in what they meant. Not even Theodor Mommsen could rescue the field, although he managed to place epigraphy at the centre of ancient historical studies.As well as this antiquarian taint, there is also the whiff of trade: academic numismatists have to rub shoulders with amateurs, many of whom possess great technical ...”

“... the arguments about cultural identity, language, gender and inclusiveness stirred up by the 1991 Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, which covered 1500 years of work in Latin, Norman French, Gaelic and English. Les Murray’s New Oxford Book of Australian Verse and Anthology of Australian Religious Poetry included traditional work translated from ...”

“... the Police Investigations and Review Commissioner. Two more senior detectives, Cuddihy and Colin Field, took charge of the surveillance operation against the Turkish men. The exciting trappings of that investigation, the covert taping and Turkish-speaking undercover officers, seem to have blinded these men to the more mundane truth. ‘They thought they were ...”

“... advisory’ firm, Hakluyt, to facilitate meetings with business leaders. Hakluyt began in a field in which the UK truly excels: private spying. Named after the Elizabethan geographer Richard Hakluyt, the company was founded in 1995 by a group of former MI6 agents, but in recent years has sought to distance itself from the world of spooks. Spying on ...”

“... questions for a charity literary quiz. Suggest:Q. Who thought the Venerable Bede was a woman?A. Field Marshal Haig, who said so after musing for some time beside the Venerable Bede’s tomb at Durham, presumably mixing up George Eliot and Adam Bede.Q. Where in Oxford would you find a crucifix that had been gazed on by Pascal?A. Campion Hall. (It is a ...”

“... Ireland in the 1950s, a place not altogether unlike the white-ruled South Africa evoked in the frank confessional of David Schalkwyk’s opening chapter. In the apartheid world, the young Schalkwyk ‘was defined legally, socially and … psychologically as a “master”’, even as the material realities of bondage were masked (and painfully ...”