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“... of Robert Browning’s Dramatis Personae. The author of Andrea del Sarto would have found in Richard Strauss a subject ideally suited to his imaginative powers. He would have cast the composer, not, I think, in his early years, but towards the end of his life: in 1940, perhaps, in late summer. The scene: Strauss’s ...”

“... Implementation of Treaties’. It’s a long sentence packed with dynamite. ‘All such rights, powers, liabilities, obligations and restrictions from time to time created or arising by or under the Treaties, and all such remedies and procedures from time to time provided for by or under the Treaties, as in accordance with the Treaties are without further ...”

“... the French Commisariat du Plan attracted widespread admiration, though the NEDC was denied its powers. Thirdly, the initiative was designed to seduce the unions – with their traditional commitment to the notion of a planned economy – into collaborating with government priorities and, in particular, the incomes policy launched simultaneously under the ...”

“... Justice to complain of the ‘new despotism’ caused by the growth of executive discretionary powers. Since 2012 the ministry has been headed by Conservative apparatchiks whose previous experience has not been in law but in broadcasting. One of the more arcane inherited institutions is the Privy Council. Apparently the oldest surviving governmental ...”

“... or messengers. Ellison’s dream was of a different kind. His friends included the black novelist Richard Wright and critics like Kenneth Burke and Stanley Edgar Hyman; his heroes were Joyce and Eliot; he studied The Golden Bough for the mythical themes he hoped would make his novel immortal. Ellison aspired mightily and he dressed the part as he imagined ...”

“... By far the most striking image of Richard II is the one found in the great portrait of him, crowned and enthroned, which still survives in Westminster Abbey. Painted in the 1390s, when the king was in his twenties, it gives him a slightly boyish, even feminine appearance, with red cheeks, full lips and a small goatee beard ...”

“... a tent placed over it’. When faced with contradictions on the Travels, Bredin sometimes uses his powers of invention to overcome them. To cite one instance: Bruce, describing an outbreak of smallpox, reportedly in 1770, claimed that Welled Hawaryat, the son of Ras Michael Sehul, the powerful ruler of Tigray, was treated by a monk carrying a ‘large cross ...”

“... The official had a good look at the soles of my shoes, to make sure that I wasn’t doing a Richard Reid, planning to detonate the semtex I was walking on at 35,000 feet. We had a meal as we waited for our flight to be called, eating with plastic cutlery. I could almost hear the conscientious click of stable-doors being closed on empty stalls. Perhaps ...”

“... put out by the ‘Aryan Nations’, had run a ‘wanted’ list of mugshots, exposing the real powers behind Zog. My own name appeared next to that of Norman Podhoretz. Momentarily chilling as it was to feel ‘wanted’ by these people (let alone to be gazetted with Podhoretz), the overwhelming impression was of crankiness cut with impotent, pitiable ...”

“... to read it: as an admission at this early stage of ‘how little faith he had in his literary powers’. Far from doubting those powers Bellow is concerned that if he should fully release them he might well lose even the relatively small audience he has so far managed to attract. His uncertainties have to do with the ...”

“... onto Russia alone, proclaiming the closeness of the US, and by extension the other major Western powers, to the Yeltsin Presidency and Government. But this policy has come under increasing attack, first from outside the Administration and now from within, in the aftermath of the Clinton-Yeltsin summit which saw Clinton trumpeting his belief in Yeltsin’s ...”

“... European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg delivered its first judgment on 1 July 1961. Gerard Richard Lawless had been arrested four years earlier while attempting to travel from Ireland to Great Britain. Under a 1940 amendment to the Irish Offences against the State Act (1939), a government minister could order the detention without trial of ‘any ...”

“... with acuity on Madison and Jefferson and on Jack Ruby (the assassin of Kennedy’s assassin) and Richard Nixon. He is the closest thing the New World has to a Chesterton or a Burke. Who better to reflect on the relationship of sin and power, of eros and daring, of charisma and catastrophe, than an American pilgrim whose journey has taken him from William ...”

“... The chief of the Agency’s clandestine wing, Angleton’s long-time friend (but also boss) Richard Helms, worried that the Nosenko matter would blow up in the newspapers. He never lost faith in Angleton, a man he had known since OSS days and had trusted to protect the CIA from the ultimate Cold War nightmare – discovery of a high-level Soviet ...”

“... of thought is that although understanding is always of objects under a description, the causal powers of objects to hurt or help us are unaffected by the way they are described. We shall get sick and die, no matter how we describe disease and death. The Christian Scientists are, alas, wrong. The weak point of scientism is the inference from the fact that a ...”