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“... to the nation if it is what eventually leads to its timely collapse. The resignations are the best-publicised outgrowth of governmental decay. The litany of names reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the ...”

“... and political figures of the 19th century. His Dostoyevski (1931) is often claimed to be his best book, though I do not think that he himself liked it very much (he preferred his Bakunin). It was a wonderfully concise account of the life, and it combined psychological penetration with a capacity for irony: Ostrovsky, for instance, ‘was addicted to that ...”

“... to attayne good learning.’ But he could do little to shake the general assumption that ‘the best Scholemaster of our time, was the greatest beater.’ As a grammar school pupil and (if Aubrey is to be believed) a sometime teacher himself, Shakespeare must have been familiar with both sides of this disciplinary regime; and his references to ...”

“... they produced (see below), each unit is represented by a red dot; the position of the dot is the best estimate of the mortality rate; the bars through the dot mark the 95 per cent confidence interval: if the data are accurate and the method unbiased, 95 per cent of the time the true rate will be somewhere in this range. Hospital units are arranged in order ...”

“... to discover truth is restricted to a few, and to endure it exhibited by scarcely more. The best regime will therefore reflect differences in human excellence, and be led by an appropriate élite. But although the highest virtue is philosophical contemplation of the truth, this does not mean – contrary to a superficial reading of the Republic – that ...”

“... who knows what would have happened? But it wouldn’t have been that. Moore’s​ account works best when the bubble is the story. The most dramatic chapter by far is the one that describes how the Thatcher government managed to tie its fate to the poll tax, a misjudgment of mind-bending proportions. Like all the ...”

“... Children, wrote to Enid Blyton to ask whether she would be willing to be interviewed about the best holiday she could remember. ‘Dear Mr Gamlin,’ Blyton wrote the next day. ‘Thank you for your nice letter. It all sounds very interesting but I ought to warn you of something you obviously don’t know, but which has been well known in the literary and ...”

“... Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in the strange case of Assange. But there is something else about the genre, a sense that the world might be more ghosted now than at any time in history. Isn’t Wikipedia entirely ghosted? Isn’t ...”

“... Ellen but Nellie, a name-form that peaked in the 1880s and 1890s. Orthography became important: Geoffrey or Jeffrey, Ann or Anne, Stephen or Steven. Girls’ names were especially given to whim and proliferation. In the 1930s, my mother was christened Doreen because a Russian acquaintance of my grandfather said that was the name of the nicest girl he had ...”

“... worry,’ said Delia. ‘Two months of this place and you’ll be saying “shit” with the best of them.’ (She actually meant ‘fuck’ but didn’t think Mrs Donaldson was quite ready for this yet.) Her other performance was as one of the group when she had, like the rest of them, to pretend to be whatever the case notes required … a grieving ...”

“... so tried to avoid products like paper towels or plastics linked to deforestation. But despite her best efforts, she simply wasn’t able to manage it. What’s more, this framing ignores the fact that people living in different parts of the world have very different per capita emissions, and that overconsumption in the Global North means that children born in ...”

“... topic of Political Union. Her explosion at Andreotti’s ambush finished her. In London, Geoffrey Howe took a dim view of her reaction, and within a month she was ejected from office. No wonder she hated her Italian colleagues, to the point of saying: ‘To put it bluntly, if I were an Italian I might prefer rule from Brussels too.’ Thatcher ...”

“... the whole cobwebby structure. The pound was allowed to float free on the foreign exchanges, while Geoffrey Howe’s budgets squeezed inflation out of the economy by raising interest rates sky-high. The combination was lethal. Suddenly, as speculative money rushed into the country, the pound soared to $2.40. Firms faced phenomenally high costs at home, to ...”

“... a chimney-sweep or a coalman rampaged through our spotless house. I look up chimney-sweeps in Geoffrey Grigson’s The Englishman’s Flora (shamefully out of print) and find that, the flowers being black and dusty, chimney-sweep and chimney-sweeper are Warwickshire slang for the plantain, particularly the ribwort, and that these were used to bind up ...”

“... him. From Hamburg he wrote to Mary Manning in 1936: ‘All the lavatory men say Heil Hitler. The best pictures are in the cellar.’ Soon afterwards, he wrote to McGreevy: ‘I have met a lot of friendly people here, mostly painters … They are all more or less suppressed, i.e. cannot exhibit publicly and dare sell only with precaution. The group was broken ...”