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“... in this new selection of his television criticism to Walter Pater, Keats, Saul Bellow and John Donne – consorting with boisterous jokes about the crushed budgerigars composing J.R.’s hatband. James goes as far as it is possible to go towards miscegenating Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and The John Curry ...”

“... of the Bible Belt, a movement whose votes every Republican president since Reagan has depended on. John McCain is the party’s first presidential candidate in forty years who hasn’t secured the evangelical vote. H.L. Hunt, according to one of his enemies, ‘would be the most dangerous man in America if he wasn’t such a damn hick’. Hick or not, he was ...”

“... how Richard Scott, Laurance’s cousin and the chairman of the Scott Trust, flew to London from Washington on what my old employers would have called a ‘mercy mission’ to save us from being sold into slavery by his kinsman. This ignorance may have had something to do with the fact that I worked almost entirely at the House of Commons and rarely visited ...”

“... the Beat scene and later became a boozy guru to the hippies. In 1967, during an anti-war march in Washington, he advised Ed Sanders and Allen Ginsberg on their ambitious scheme to exorcise the Pentagon. If they really hoped to levitate the building – and they did – Smith suggested they would need a live cow, painted with magical symbols. It was a long ...”

“... war’ endured by Mozambique was orchestrated and financed by South Africa. Pretoria and Washington bear most of the blame for the 20-year conflict in Angola. But the holocaust in Portuguese East Timor, half a small island off the northern coast of Australia, was the doing of the Indonesian dictatorship of former general Suharto – with crucial ...”

“... At around 3.30 a.m. on Wednesday, 4 November 2020 (which was 10.30 p.m. on Tuesday, 3 November in Washington DC) it looked as if it was happening a third time. Trump was going to win Florida, despite the millions of dollars spent there by Michael Bloomberg, and he was storming ahead of his 2016 numbers in Ohio. The other swing states were closer, but they ...”

“... spring to mind) may wish to consider why the Jamahiriyya, despite mending its fences with Washington and London in 2003-4 and dealing reasonably with Paris and Rome, should have proved so vulnerable to their sudden hostility. And the Libyan war should also prompt us to examine what the actions of the Western powers in relation to Africa and Asia, and ...”

“... prosecution, never existed. The four men, three arms-dealers called Michael Aspin, Eric Matson and John Taylor and a Lloyds underwriter called William Harper, were tried at the Old Bailey in early 1988. Aspin, Harper and Matson were found guilty and sent to prison – Aspin is still inside. Taylor was acquitted. Aspin, who was cast as the ringleader, pleaded ...”

“... possible. Shockley worked out first the theory of semiconduction, and then set his colleagues John Bardeen and Walter Brattain to work on a practical device to manipulate electrical current on a semiconductor. On 23 December 1947 they demonstrated the first working transistor. That invention won the three men the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956.Shockley ...”

“... rather than the sombre integrity of classical scholarship. Sophomores traipse round the Washington National Gallery, its rooms stocked with Berenson’s acquisitions, carrying Ferguson’s Guide to Christian Signs and Symbols rather than the once ubiquitous Italian Painters of the Renaissance. Similarly, Berenson’s canvas-tapping, idiom-hunting ...”

“... the process. It also reflects the strikingly ‘novelistic’ character of many of their lives. John Barrell has observed acutely (in the LRB of 2 November 2000) that so-called literary biography seems now to have become markedly less ‘literary’, subordinating or virtually ignoring the work of the writer concerned, except insofar as it can be made to ...”

“... In February 1981 Mrs Thatcher made an ecstatic pilgrimage to Washington to commune with the new President, Ronald Reagan, about such then modish topics as supply-side economics and the evil empire. Hugo Young recalls the ‘patronising astonishment’ with which her Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, witnessed this effusive display ...”

“... According to John Cheever, 1948 was ‘the year everybody in the United States was worried about homosexuality’. And nobody was more worried than the federal government, which was rumoured to be teeming with gays and lesbians. One might think that Washington’s attentions would have been focused elsewhere – on the Soviet Union, for example, or on Communist spies – but in 1950, President Truman’s advisers warned him that ‘the country is more concerned about the charges of homosexuals in the government than about Communists ...”

“... else. Despite the confidently comprehensive title they gave it, the editors of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were defeated by the task of assembling all of their late colleague’s plays: we will never know how many nights’ sleep they lost over their failure to secure a copy of Love’s Labour’s Won, written before 1598 and printed ...”

“... against evils, and perhaps there is no easier business,’ Trollope said of the anti-slavery MP John Bright, a theatrical orator who couldn’t be bothered with political detail. Celebrating the Civil War as a triumph of freedom over slavery is equally easy. A few decades ago, US historians tried to complicate this heroic narrative. Guided at times by ...”