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“... Right and Left linked up behind common candidates to stop it. It is a dramatic assertion of power for the Front to bring about an alliance between political enemies; it also appears to justify Le Pen’s jibe that, whatever their party labels, all France’s other politicians are wishy-washy social democrats of the same ineffective and corrupt ...”

“... if the Muslim Brotherhood and its Tunisian counterpart, Nahda, or the Renaissance Party, come to power. Chourfi and Ali admit they used to be admirers of Iran. Ali did his student dissertation on Marx, and when the Iranian Revolution happened he and his friends felt enormous excitement. ‘Iran was the example of revolutionary Islam building a state. We were ...”

“... to overdo the flashback. We see and hear three phone calls in the narrative present. A man called Jonathan Shields is trying to reach three Hollywood figures, a director (Barry Sullivan), an actress (Lana Turner) and a writer (Dick Powell), in that order. The first two refuse to take the call, the third takes it and tells Shields to drop dead. Next, still in ...”

“... inflicted by time itself but of conscious decisions made by an author in possession of absolute power over his material. This is unfortunate, because it means that at those very moments when the book is straining its hardest to be authentic (particularly in one farmworker’s lengthy and militantly incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness monologue) it does ...”

“... imperial school of geographers for whom all Western mapping of new territory was an exercise in power and control. Unfortunately he seeks to impose a simpler structure on his findings as he moves into the 20th century. His thesis is that the history of mapping shows the idea of the region changing and becoming more coherent, and that this process culminated ...”

“... ambition. James was not unpopular, and he had proved an effective ruler during his three years in power, in spite of having two Dutch-sponsored rebellions to put down. He had shown that he was not averse to violence, but on the whole his subjects respected him as their duly anointed ruler, and he was revered by many as the last surviving child of the martyred ...”

“... first appeared when the French mandate ended in 1946, but the Baath Party dumped it when it took power in 1963. Now it is the symbol of what activists call the intifada or, more hopefully, the thawra (‘revolution’). On the dot of seven the lights went out in the blocks of flats on one side of the square. ‘Just the usual ...”

“... the march of the Qin rulers across five centuries culminating in their final seizure of absolute power in China, Watson has at last given us the kind of manageable yet deeply nuanced volume that should bring Sima Qian, if not exactly into household parlance, at least into the domain of those who enjoy Thucydides, Xenophon or Herodotus. Burton Watson’s Qin ...”

“... he justly calls ‘the minefield of fact and fantasy’. He says, uneasily, that ‘myths have a power and momentum of their own,’ which presumably means that life has begun to imitate art. He never says explicitly whether he believes Buscetta or not. Similarly he writes gingerly that Genco Russo, a notorious mafioso, was ‘often spoken of as a leading ...”

“... which might have been elegantly resolved by an architect-engineer, were as nothing next to the power of the great estates that the rivers flow through – Wilton House and Longford Castle. Sixty years ago deference was assumed. The earls of Radnor and Pembroke did not get where they are by ceding their land for the common good. This holds true today, as ...”

“... the city of Nanjing on the Yangtze River and then, in 1989, to a state-sponsored job at a thermal power plant. He was thus spared the heady demonstrations of that year in Beijing, and the savage government repression that followed, though he would have had plenty of opportunity to observe the effects of Deng Xiaoping’s emphasis on the need for rapid ...”

“... Entrepreneur in politics’: how many aspirants for power – most recently Silvio Berlusconi, Ross Perot and Michael Heseltine – have traded under that description. On the basis of a successful business record, they have claimed to be equipped to perform startling political feats – cutting through red tape, banging heads together, turning the country round, getting us on the move again ...”

“... remarks, though they will seem truisms to many actors, are distanced, as in a time-warp, from Jonathan Miller’s handsome, thoughtful book about ‘directors’ theatre’, Subsequent Performances. This book is, among other things, an apologia for Miller’s own work as a drama director and an essay on the effects of Time upon the Drama. He is always ...”

“... The violence of their showdown in the final scene of the book exposes the terrible drive to power which such philosophies encode: to be in control of your own life, after all, you have to be in control of everybody else’s first. Carey is especially qualified to make us realise this because his most brilliant gift is for plotting: he lays ...”

“... before a large public and to dominate those who might otherwise dominate him. He wanted ‘power over the powerful’. Given the tenacity with which he continued to pursue this dream, we can see him – though Smith does not quite say so – as a maladjusted adolescent fantasist with an unrequited craving for his mother’s affection. Though the son of ...”