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“... part of the festivities marking the 200th anniversary of the United States constitution, Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to sit on the US Supreme Court, delivered a hugely controversial speech. Noting the quasi-religious reverence in which the framers of the constitution are held in America, Marshall expressed ...”

“... like Salome Dear, Not in the Fridge! and became a jolly television games-player (yes, Arthur Marshall); another, who served in Intelligence, took to wearing bangles and a large diamond in one ear, and was barred from Wimbledon for designing too-saucy dresses for tennis women (Teddy Tinling); a third, who rose from private in the Honourable Artillery ...”

“... Protesters in Minneapolis on the morning of 29 May, three days after local police murdered George Floyd, were monitored by a Reaper drone deployed by US Customs and Border Protection, circling four miles above the city. News of the deployment elicited widespread alarm; a letter signed by several senior members of Congress condemned the use of ‘live ...”

“... good behaviour. The ‘Christless code’ of pistols at dawn does not rate a mention in Andrew St George’s The Descent of Manners, a study of ‘the subtle binding codes that ruled all aspects of 19th-century life’. His concern is only with the middle classes, who had their own sense of honour but were less ready to create widows and orphans when ...”

“... disinterested sympathy with others. It is odd to reflect that democratic Whitman was born before George III died, during our Regency period, when Hazlitt flourished, among Jacobins and Anti-Jacobins, playing the part of an anti-Anti-Jacobin (much as Conor Cruise O’Brien used to be an anti-Anti-Communist, before he found other fish to fry). To write about ...”

“... In his farewell address in 1796 George Washington counselled the new nation to refrain from ‘passionate attachment’ to or ‘inveterate hatred’ of any other nation and to cultivate instead peace and harmony with all. A passionate attachment to another nation, he warned, could create the illusion of a common interest where no common interest exists ...”

“... policy in a generation’. Yet the president’s words have a familiar ring. In September 1999 George W. Bush, then a presidential candidate, introduced his defence programme at the Citadel military school in Charleston. ‘Our forces in the next century must be agile, lethal, readily deployable,’ he said. ‘Our military must be able to identify targets ...”

“... two fundamentally opposing views and still function: who dreamed that one up?’ Roy Bland asks George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974). ‘Scott Fitzgerald,’ Smiley replies. The aphorism, or at any rate Bland’s paraphrase, applies just as well to a double-agent. Or to any spy: Smiley and his kind perpetrate all sorts of illegal, immoral and ...”

“... does not express Marx’s power with anything like the energy, charm and impassioned conviction of Marshall Berman’s collection of essays, Adventures in Marxism. Berman’s clean, personal prose comes as sweet relief after the dreary O-level-set-text style of Wheen’s plodding descriptions of the 1848 revolutions. Berman, now approaching 60, has ...”

“... In​ 1948, George Grosz sat for a portrait by Stanley Kubrick, then a young photographer for Look magazine. Grosz sits astride a backwards desk chair in the middle of light pedestrian traffic on Fifth Avenue. Neatly dressed in a suit and shiny black shoes, with a very slight smile, Grosz looks as though he’s conquering New York, as he did Berlin ...”

“... copy Patricia’s shingle hairstyle and it becomes the rage. The Secret of Japan (1906) by George W. Draper    Takasuma, a Japanese-American scientist, invents a machine that makes people invisible. His friend Fowler accidentally steps in front of the ray. Fowler is extremely unhappy being invisible, and Mrs Fowler is not pleased. Takasuma promises ...”

“... the Atomic Energy Authority, or Con Allday and British Nuclear Fuels, or the men around Sir Walter Marshall in the CEGB, would have taken time off to authorise private detective agencies to rummage round the house of a 78-year-old former rose-grower who had written an elegant, though unoriginal paper on the arcane problems of nuclear waste disposal and reactor ...”

“... But this is in comparison with the clichéridden public pronouncements he was given to making: George Ball, who twice campaigned against him, has written of ‘a plodding fivestar general uttering pedestrian language written by some journalistic hack with all the grace of a gun-carriage being hauled across cobblestones’. It appears from the diaries that ...”

“... to the unfashionable writers of the English realist school, to Wordsworth and (above all) to the George Eliot of The Mill on the Floss, ‘that cruel social history of English religion, locating its true centre in the Lares and Penates, a dense structure of things which defined who you were and what your relation to others was’. Substitute ‘the literary ...”

“... shameless narcissism’: but, alertly translated by Eisenstein’s former student Herbert Marshall, it is a convincing demonstration of Baudelaire’s idea that ‘the convalescent, like the child, possesses in the highest degree the capacity to take an acute interest in things, even those that seem most trivial.’ In fact, most of the material in ...”