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“... of a first meeting with a member of a previously unencountered tribe, a birder fresh from the bush. My most memorable youthful twitch was in the autumn of 1975. I was 14. At Breydon Water in Norfolk a greater yellowlegs had been found, a very rare North American wader, like an attenuated redshank, with thin straw-yellow legs, a delicate long bill and ...”

“... with his own on the question of possible military action in Iraq. Before looking at his reasons, we need to consider the case of a Foreign Office official who did resign over Iraq. In a memo dated 18 March 2003 Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the Foreign Office’s deputy legal adviser, who had been in the diplomatic service for 29 years, told her superiors that using ...”

“... want to spoil those good feelings by making the sharp criticisms that Obama deserves. So we are reduced, in Reed’s words, to ‘a desiccated leftism’ preoccupied with ‘making up “Just So” stories about dispossession and exploitation recast in the evocative but politically sterile language of disparity and diversity’. The chief electoral ...”

“... of a resignation honours list that rewarded those who – oh, dash it, I don’t know – shall we say made money rather than earned it? Anyway, in the photograph Wilson looks like nothing so much as a grinning monkey on a stick, and in the matter of the honours list he achieved the near-impossible feat of discrediting the discredited and making a ...”

“... his life, quotes the story of Ford, an over-age wartime second lieutenant, playing golf with Lloyd George and giving the PM a piece of his mind on golfing etiquette: had he refrained, he told Lowell, he ‘would have been a general of a division’. Lowell speaks of ‘lies that made the great your equals’, which identifies one major motive for ...”

“... a lot of his money from masturbatory aids such as telephone chat-lines and Asian Babes magazine. We should, however, beware of the temptation to chart a nation’s moral decline through the personalities of its newspaper proprietors. Beaverbrook was the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, a sturdy defender of the empire and the man who, as Churchill’s ...”

“... those who want confirmation of the obvious, ‘you can look it up.’) But what Doc said to me as we watched that scene play out 13 years ago still rings as the most prophetic warning I’ve heard about the closing decades of the 20th century: ‘Jesus, Craig, we’re all going to die or be indicted now!’ By the time ...”

“... himself at one point to ‘head back to Marley’s house’. Marley isn’t left blank, exactly: we hear quite a lot about his under-the-table philanthropy, his physical beauty, his politico-religious worldview, and about the sniffiness with which he was viewed by the small, determinedly self-improving black middle class, which wasn’t at first thrilled by ...”

“... Either he had been persuaded of this by the recycled Cold Warriors clustering round the Bush administration, or they had failed to inform their ‘key ally’ of their determination to dismantle Iraq’s state and security structures. More ominously, Blair seemed wholly uninterested in Iraq as a complex and puzzling political society, wanting ...”

“... their animosities were great, their affections were proportionate: they, perhaps, loved, where we only pity; and were stern and inexorable, where we are not merciful, but only irresolute.’ Imbued with refinement, modern civility and humanity, 18th-century man was ‘accustomed to think of the individual with ...”

“... I will do and what I won’t do. Fourthly, he’s full of new ideas all the time. And, finally, we’ve been together so long that he not only understands me, I understand him. This says a good deal about both men. One is a big Babbitt; a Babbitt on a global scale. The other is a Babbitt more in the Osric mould: a tenth-rater who knows how to make himself ...”

“... Khaled was important. For the Gulf War, after massive arms purchases from the West had discredited George Bush’s promise to reduce the level of weapons in the Middle East, ended as a net profit to the Western alliance, fought by young men from Glasgow and Detroit but paid for by the man who likes to call himself the ‘Guardian of the Two Holy ...”

“... you to wonder where you might be. The bit of the journey with not a lot to look at is the bit we tend to remember (55 per cent of the London Underground system runs above ground). Dull, unforgiving tunnels exacerbate our awareness of the time that still remains before space will once again resume with a welcome savage rush. And there’s a further, even ...”

“... now likes to call herself’ – while he was in jail. Mann’s account doesn’t add much to what we know about the attempted coup; in some respects it tells us less than Adam Roberts’s excellent The Wonga Coup.* Roberts names more names than Mann does, including Jeffrey Archer’s (he may have donated money), and gives some broad hints as to the identity ...”

“... is no sculpture to it, and Marochetti died in 1867. As for those undisciplined evergreens, neither bush nor tree, bickering and collapsing shapelessly into one another, were they really cypresses, deformed from their true Italian straightness and nobility? The church was open but the verger could not tell me: ‘To me a tree is just a tree.’ Chaotic in ...”