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“... From the moment he announced his staff and cabinet appointments (Rahm Emanuel, Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates et al) it was clear that Obama meant to play by the same Washington rules that created the policy disasters he inherited from George W. Bush. Obama had retreated into politics as usual. He never looked back. One did ...”

“... In May 1983 he was promoted to assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey, and over the next couple of years he oversaw a secret team – operating in part out of the office of Daniel Murphy, Bush’s chief of staff – which quietly conducted at least 35 covert operations against drug trafficking, terrorism and, most ...”

“... media friendly, discounts to TV crews who look like TV crews. The Paramount is clearly the joint John Lanchester’s characters allude to in The Debt to Pleasure. ‘Bed, sheets, fittings, lamps, lightbulbs – all black ... I stayed in a flash hotel in New York that was a bit like that.’ The cab-summoners, out on the street, in long torpedo coats and wool ...”

“... of India: within these loosely-defined parameters were situated schools such as Cathedral and John Connon as well as Campion, colleges like Elphinstone and St Xavier’s, the important office buildings that belonged both to the Government and to private companies, the Bombay Gymkhana club, and the Jaslok and Breach Candy Hospitals. This was where not only ...”

“... now just for Macmillan. In time, the Aubrey-Maturin books became a cult property. Iris Murdoch and John Bayley were fans, and every now and then a laudatory notice would appear in the TLS or the LRB, for which O’Brian wrote in the 1980s and 1990s.*His life began to change in 1989. Starling Lawrence, an editor at ...”

“... could be misleading. This epitaph was written, in fact, by Anna Seward, to the love of her life John Saville, and she told a friend: ‘The last line is Dr Johnson’s. My imagination refused to supply me with one equally applicable, therefore it was adopted.’ Not quite the same as the ‘coincidence and indebtedness’ Miss Lascelles describes as ‘to ...”

“... had acquaintances in the literary world (her correspondents included H.G. Wells, Bryher, H.D. and John Cowper Powys), most of her life was lived in obscurity, and her friendships were mainly epistolary ones. Her aversion to having her picture taken and her reluctance to submit to interviews (she believed that readers should ‘keep their illusions’ about ...”

“... The vision had sent it up a blind alley, from which Wittgenstein, Heidegger and, above all, John Dewey could rescue it if only it would listen. The hope for the future, he suggested, lay in Dewey’s vision of a culture no longer dominated by a hierarchy of disciplines (which had placed science in an aristocratic position, maintained by philosophy ...”

“... acquire its last territories. He marched through the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem with Allenby and T.E. Lawrence, a fortnight before Christmas. This early experience in the Middle East left a lasting impression. He learned important lessons about the need for the proper training of troops, which was to become his hallmark, and remained forever in thrall to the ...”

“... I had envied them sometimes,’ Geoff Dyer writes in Out of Sheer Rage, his 1997 book about D.H. Lawrence. ‘Those in work, those with jobs. Especially on a Friday night when, relieved that it was over for another week, they could down tools and look forward to two days of uninterrupted idleness.’ He’s sitting in hot sunshine outside a café in Taormina, supposedly researching his subject’s ‘savage pilgrimage’ but actually getting on with what turns out to be the book’s real business, which is to obsess at length about what he himself, writer, flâneur, free-floating stoner, is supposedly doing with his life ...”

“... dull, dull’. (This left its mark on her reviewing style.) The voraciousness reminded me of D.H. Lawrence and his friends in Eastwood thirty years earlier; these aspiring working-class and petit bourgeois grammar school children fuelled their appetite for change through the democracy of books available in the public libraries, balancing between highbrow and ...”

“... by 1943. If his books now end up in charity shops alongside discarded copies of the F-Plan Diet or John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, it’s because the shimmering and peaceable ‘England’ he promised is not, after all, to be found waiting at the end of a deserted lane, or, if it were, we’d never know, because we’d be stuck in a traffic ...”

“... have a misleadingly familiar ring. In 1891, Frost got himself elected to the editorship of the Lawrence, Massachusetts High School Bulletin, and his opening salute to his classmates insists that ‘this chair, when not acting as a weapon of defence, will be devoted to the caprices of its occupant.’ A fortnight before his death in 1963, he sent a message ...”

“... her by starting a relationship with her sister Frieda. (Frieda’s next husband but one was D.H. Lawrence.) Marianne and Else were at Weber’s bedside together when he died, aged 56, in 1920. Marianne died in Else’s arms at 84 in 1954. Mina died in her arms at 87 in 1967. Else herself lived to 99 and died in 1973, in the same home in Heidelberg as the ...”

“... don’t know how to talk to women and wish they knew bigger words. Dacre’s spiritual mentor was John Junor of the Sunday Express, a man who thought that men who drink white wine are ‘poofters’ and believed, according to the paper’s literary editor Graham Lord, ‘that Aids was a fair punishment for buggery’. According to a memoir written by ...”