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“... Powers: ‘It was the afternoon of my 81st birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me ... ’ And Toomey’s bedfellow maliciously warns his ancient lover that the churchman might have brought him a bull of excommunication as a birthday gift. Even an improper noise may call forth uninvited ...”

“... detail. The means chosen should, of course, be poison. The Brides in the Bath murderer George Smith and John Christie of Rillington Place fitted the bill, while the Kray Brothers became tabloid proto-celebrities even as they were ordering gangland rivals to be shot or hacked to death. But there were limits, and in 1966 the horrors that came out during the ...”

“... a Sufi commune too. Both at the same time? One after the other? It’s unclear. He enrolled in the Ali Akbar Khan College of Music and studied the North Indian classical tradition: strange new tunings and mind-expanding microtones. The discipline of repetition, the rigour of improvisation. Quiet that intrusive ego! You don’t ‘make’ music, you prepare to ...”

“... many months, Baba allowed him to train alongside other disciples: in the first instance his son Ali Akbar and his daughter Annapurna, who excelled at the surbahar (the bass sitar). Ravi and Annapurna married in 1941; their son Shubhendra was born in 1942. Shankar started to play in public and, in 1942, gave his first radio recital in Bombay. His ...”

“... Anderson shows that Marx’s views on Asia differed little from those of Hegel, Montesquieu, Adam Smith and a host of others; they were all peering through the wrong end of a telescope, or in a mirror, weighing a smattering of knowledge of Asia against their understanding of how the West developed. And Marx never took the ‘Asiatic mode’ very seriously; he ...”

“... debatable whether they can now cut them off, even at the request of the United States. Tariq Ali London Manhattan that morning was a diagram, a blue bar-chart with columns which were tall or not so tall. A silver cursor passed across the screen and clicked silently on the tallest column, which turned red and black and presently vanished. This is how we ...”

“... with stand-up comedy, boxing, burlesque and documentaries. HBO’s screening of the third Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight, the ‘Thrilla in Manila’, in 1975 caused the first big jump in the channel’s subscriber numbers. Because HBO wasn’t beholden to advertisers and had a higher tier of implied adult consent compared to the broadcasters, it had more ...”

“... of the mind would be to kill the entire population.’ I heard the CNN reporter near the tomb of Ali in Najaf say: ‘Everything outside of the mosque seems to be totalled.’ I heard Khudeir Salman, who sold ice from a donkey cart in Najaf, say he was giving up after marine snipers had killed his friend, another ice-seller: ‘I found him this morning. The ...”

“... at Ellingham Hall Assange was fast asleep. He’d been living there, at the house of Vaughan Smith, one of his sureties and founder of the Frontline Club, since his arrest on Swedish rape allegations. He was effectively under house arrest and wearing an electronic tag on his leg. He would sign in at Beccles police station every afternoon, proving he ...”

“... is of interest also. Without checking, I can think of Marx’s open indebtedness to Hegel, to Adam Smith, to the ‘Blue Books’ of the Victorian factory inspectorate, to Balzac and to Charles Darwin. In other words, Berlin was being vulgar when it must decently be presumed that he knew better. Of his other subjects, not even Joseph de Maistre receives such ...”

“... tawny port stood on the bar, and I was inspecting it when MacGregor arrived with Mr and Mrs Smith. That’s what he’d been calling them in his emails to me. Craig Wright, 45 years old, wearing a white shirt under a black jacket, a pair of blue chinos, a belt with a large Armani buckle and very green socks, wasn’t the kind of guy who seems ...”

“... cake that time. It was like the one she did every Friday for us to take to the mosque.’ Ali Jafari (left); Rania with Fethia and Hania (right) On Monday, 12 June, Rania and Naseem went to the Sainsbury’s by the canal at the north end of Ladbroke Grove. They went from there to the Westway Centre off Portobello Road; that was where Rania took ...”