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“... of dirt: a dog crappant on a lawn vert. A supermarket-till cartouche Looping inanely through a bush must have been threaded by some child. No civic wall but is defiled by spraygunned mottoes, jousting cocks – the clichés of the heterodox. The extensions of the conceit are worked out here as thoroughly as in any of the old Elizabethans, and in a fashion ...”

“... threatened to bury me. That was in 1956, when he buried the Hungarian Revolution. In California we welcomed Hungarian victims of Soviet brutality while finding no room for the Guatemalans whose democracy the CIA had crushed two years earlier. We were trained to ignore our victims and to fear our enemy. After ...”

“... loose, but I haven’t yet quite got off.’ A few months later Skelton married her next husband, George Weidenfeld. Connolly took to his bed, where his ex-wife, according to Wilson, sometimes brought him a bowl of soup. It was very like Connolly to make an ado of his wife once he had lost her and very like his ex-wife to keep a bloke in hand when the one she ...”

“... differing from deferring. Perhaps Napoleon is to blame (‘Not tonight, Josephine’). In Britain, we do things differently. Whereas Baudelaire’s vrai voyageur preferred travelling joyfully to the letdowns of arrival – in modern terms, couldn’t stop playing with his signifier – Forster’s Mrs Moore remains convinced that there is a real India to make ...”

“... novel? Here’s a beginning, with apologies to Sarah Waters and Michel Faber (and a nod to George MacDonald Fraser): London, 1860. November. A pea-souper billowing up from the flotsam bobbing in the Thames. The gas lamps already blearing. Good things of day begin to drowse. The rookeries are emptying, and their birds of prey making wing to the West ...”

“... himself to try to talk him out of it. All he succeeded in doing was securing his lifelong enmity. We know JFK was serious because he went to the trouble of persuading Johnson’s mentor Sam Rayburn, the veteran Texan speaker of the House, to let his man run. Rayburn was adamantly opposed to the idea after what he’d seen happen to another Texan titan, John ...”

“... Arab League. The PAIC meetings attracted people as disparate as the old leftist Palestinian George Habash, members of Hamas, Algerian jihadists and Iraqi Baathists – not to mention Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Then, in December 1992, President Bush dispatched the US army to Somalia on what he described as ...”

“... look of blank consternation. He would go off and investigate for himself, and in a few days, when we met again, he would be a crackpot too. Some of these people turn up in The Group. At approximately the same time as Mary McCarthy was chivvying and being chivvied all over Manhattan, Saul Bellow submitted his first short story for publication in the student ...”

“... Cooper after him, Irving had taken up his pen partly in response to financial difficulties.) We don’t know which novel Cooper put aside in exasperation in the middle of May 1820, exclaiming ‘I could write you a better book than that myself!’, but by November that year the first of his 32 novels was in print, and he was halfway through his ...”

“... that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: "We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War."’ Nouvel Observateur: ‘And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?’ Brzezinski: ‘What is more important in ...”

“... typology, Edward’s chosen status could be prefigured by depictions of Moses and the burning bush or of Saul on the road to Damascus – as they are in a striking piece of surviving Yorkist poster art, now in the British Library. In historical terms, Edward was the new Constantine, the British-born Emperor whose victories were preceded by a vision of the ...”

“... calculation would change for ever. The unlikely setting for the transformation – as detailed in George Dyson’s engaging history – was the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The institute had been founded in 1930 with funding from the department-store magnate Louis Bamberger and his sister, Caroline Bamberger Fuld. Advised by the education ...”

“... she is accompanying the Italian president to London to meet Jack Straw and she also translated for Bush on his visit to Italy last year. The library at the British Council is busy and full of students who only leave when it closes at 8 p.m., and seeing these young Italians reading English books and magazines, watching videos and generally finding this a ...”

“... 81 seconds of their beating of King had been videotaped by a resident in a nearby apartment, George Holliday. What Holliday did with the tape was momentous. He did not hand it over to the Police. Had he done so, there would have been an internal tribunal, and most likely some stern disciplinary action. There might also have been judicial control over the ...”

“... would say into their mouthpieces: ‘Eagle One is on the move’? She would tell her investors: ‘We’re in a market for people who don’t like having a needle stuck in their arm.’ That is: her market was everyone who isn’t a masochist. She would say that doctors make treatment decisions based on blood tests – that’s inescapable. But what if you ...”