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“... Tarantino’s characters swear all the time – there are even more motherfuckers here than in Miles Davis’s autobiography – and are more or less impossible to understand. Tarantino has come to be seen as a kind of Post-Modern primitive, neither immoral nor amoral but pre-moral, a kid who loves the shoot-’em-ups in movies and hasn’t even thought ...”

“... Ministry of Defence, assessing the dangers of a major accident at the Trident base at Faslane (25 miles from Glasgow and about forty from half the population of Scotland) concluded that the ‘societal contamination’ that would result meant that ‘the risks are close to the tolerability criterion level’. But these are old-fashioned issues. Onwards to ...”

“... author also of Amazing Grace: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song and a biography of Cliff Richard – can’t be unaware of the implied contrast with the Paschal lamb of Exodus 12.46 and the fulfilment of the Scripture in the Gospel of John, chapter 19 (‘Then came the soldiers, and brake the legs of the first, and of the other which was crucified ...”

“... whereas temporal immigrants feel usurped. For spatial immigrants, the old country is thousands of miles away in another place, whereas for temporal immigrants, the old country is right there, buried under the new one, and they have no way of digging it out, except through revolution, or the ballot box, or, if the right guy should come along, a revolution and ...”

“... forced labour ‘had practically exterminated the existing population for a distance of fifty miles either side of the track’. In 1915, one HCB official admitted that most of the workforce of Leverville consisted of slaves who were handed a workbook, a machete and a blanket and set to work. It was said that few men would choose to work there, especially ...”

“... an Arriva bus and quits Leeds via Hunslet, which also appears more or less obliterated since Richard Hoggart, who described its working-class culture so memorably in The Uses of Literacy, grew up there. Next comes Woodlesford, where McKie gazes round for any trace of the rhubarb for which the place was once well known, and we chug onwards to ...”

“... by Clinton as she races round the globe, visiting 112 countries and logging nearly a million miles (as she repeatedly tells us). Energised by ‘a bias for action’, she pursues a frenetic agenda: promoting international economic agreements that will allow nations to ‘play by the rules’ on ‘a level playing field’, ‘creating jobs and exciting ...”

“... Niazi, chose surrender rather than martyrdom, for which his colleagues, a thousand miles from the battlefield, were never to forgive him. In December 1971, East Pakistan became Bangladesh and 90,000 West Pakistani soldiers ended up in Indian prisoner of war camps. Nixon, Kissinger and Mao had all ‘tilted towards Pakistan’ but to little ...”

“... with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement’ – and also of Richard Gregory, and his ‘perceptual hypotheses’. The illusions, the apparitions, whatever I should call them, were clearly conjectures, guesses ... perceptual hypotheses. While utterly helpless amid pandemonic illusions, I said fiercely and desperately to ...”

“... attitude is described as ‘the unease of conquerors: the unseemliness of finding themselves few miles from Hiroshima’. In 2007, looking back across a distance of sixty years, Hazzard said that the visit to Hiroshima taught her to start thinking ‘with compassion or imagination of the people who were our enemies, who had gone to blazes in those two atomic ...”

“... think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of ...”

“... generals are said to have been horrified when Sargent opened Thayer’s valise. According to Richard Murray of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the prototype garment resembled an old hunting jacket, trailing strips of coloured cloth and daubed with patches of colour that reflected Thayer’s interest in harlequin costumes. It’s not clear whether ...”

“... These men and women had been noticed before: they were the ‘silent majority’ invoked by Richard Nixon. The speechwriter who coined that phrase, Pat Buchanan, would become the insurgent Republican of the 1992 primaries, and at the 1992 party convention he gave a speech that seems the prototype for Trump’s inaugural. In fact, Trump delivered no ...”

“... doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’. In a letter of 1818 to his friend Richard Woodhouse, Keats describes it like this:When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that, I am in a ...”

“... is a massively ugly parody-arch in the middle of nowhere. You see it coming up on the horizon from miles away. (‘The majestic Memorial to the Missing,’ says Miss Coombs, ‘stands amid fields still scarred with the trench lines of the Leipzig Redoubt.’) Blakey would call it fugly. Loads of Castles among the 73,000-or-so incised names, though nobody known ...”