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“... of Britain would think if it were claimed that their ‘feelings, desires and aspirations’ were best represented by ‘dukes, earls and barons’. Later Harold Wilson used exactly the same analogy to Smith. Most Colonial Office personnel seem to have taken Banda’s and Wilson’s side. In March 1965 the British high commissioner in Southern Rhodesia ...”

“... a History Man, Patrick Collinson reveals that when as a young man he was asked by the medievalist Geoffrey Barraclough at a job interview what his research method was, all he could say was that he tried to look at everything which was remotely relevant to his subject: ‘I had no “method”, only an omnium gatherum of materials culled from more or less ...”

“... straight up the rocks: a proper jetty was built only in 1912. Walkers could access one of the best beaches, at Port es Saies, by means of a rope hanging over the cliff.Victorians and Edwardians who took this sort of thing in their stride made Sark a tourist destination. Once steamers opened the Channel Islands to British travellers in the 1830s, Sark’s ...”

“... but, as with everything else about Katerina, we cannot be sure. ‘I write poems and make the best of what I have’ is as much as she will tell us. The haunting thing about the book is what’s missing from it, what it refrains from giving away, and absence is also an effect of the language, which isn’t bad but too colourlessly correct, continually ...”

“... important males. These could be the men of her own party, as when she notes how hopeless Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine were when they accompanied her on a visit to Reagan in 1985. ‘I did not bring them again,’ she remarks, for all the world as though they were a couple of incontinent pet dogs. But foreign statesmen could fare little ...”

“... accounts of their experience. I can think only of Nigel Lawson and, rather less thoroughly, Geoffrey Howe, who have done us the favour of attempting serious revelation of their public work – though the first Thatcher volume, highly selective as it is, is in a special class, and Douglas Hurd, who did produce a little gem about the Heath years, may yet ...”

“... the headhunters, Price Waterhouse, what is one to make of the report that they were auditors to Geoffrey Robinson’s company, Transtec, whose accounts are currently being investigated? Patronage at one or two removes still remains patronage. Of the four independents, three are assigned to the Celtic fringe; Welsh and Scottish independents will no doubt ...”

“... as a verbalist, someone who could perceive no reality beyond words, who liked the bigger ones the best, and who wanted his readers to cry out with ‘ahs’ and ‘ohs’ as they reached for their dictionaries. Geoffrey Grigson, in a review that Burgess seems to have learned by heart, said that his journalism was driven by ...”

“... days the shops still accepted ordinary money, and my mother used to say that what she liked best about the place, apart from the Mary O’Hara records, was that with its bumpy single-track roads and straying donkeys it reminded her of the prewar Dales of her childhood. The only time I remember thinking that something really foreign was happening on one ...”

“... Over the course​ of a week in March, Lee Sedol, the world’s best player of Go, played a series of five games against a computer program. The series, which the program AlphaGo won 4-1, took place in Seoul, while tens of millions watched live on internet feeds. Go, usually considered the most intellectually demanding of board games, originated in China but developed into its current form in Japan, enjoying a long golden age from the 17th to the 19th century ...”

“... the consistency of identity, the self as a seamless web. Already the richly humanistic efforts of Geoffrey Hartman, Pierre Bourdieu and Christopher Norris are rescuing the work of Heidegger and de Man without endangering the principle that ideology and text are invariably (if complexly) related. But what do we do with Anthony Blunt? Here was no mere ...”

“... arrange for what would inevitably be seen as an attack from within, if not a stab in the back. The best that can be said on behalf of Mr Derek Pattinson, the Secretary-General of the Synod, and Mr James Shelley, the Secretary to the Church Commissioners, who passed Dr Bennett’s essay for publication, is that they may have been lulled into a sense of false ...”

“... in their stride, along with all those Biblical references. The narrator of The Sorrows of Satan, Geoffrey Tempest, is a self-pitying failed novelist who receives by the same post the news that he has been left five million pounds and a friendly self-introduction from a mysterious Prince Lucio Rimânez. When the superbly poised Prince arrives, the lights go ...”

“... of the Union but not neglecting the rest, and focusing mainly on politics. The great strengths of Geoffrey Hosking’s The First Socialist Society are cultural history and a feel for the texture of life; Ronald Grigor Suny’s The Soviet Experiment, which also came out last year, is best at social history, the nationalities ...”

“... Barnes (b. 1946), although nothing from Shuttlecock, by Graham Swift (b. 1949), which gives the best description I know of the territory, real and psychological, in which his generation grew up in Britain: What attracted me then about Camber was less its whispering billows of sand and wheeling black-headed gulls ... [than] the relics of the war that still ...”