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“... triumph at the carnage were immediately beamed around the world. When it became clear, as it did straight away, that the attack was an appalling error, the US compounded its mistake: President Reagan claimed self-defence and the ship’s commander and crew were awarded high military honours. Two days after the downing of the Iranian airbus, Tehran Radio ...”

“... as wide as 16 points. Corbyn is the most unpopular opposition leader on record, polling worse than Michael Foot, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard and Ed Miliband, all of whom went on to lose general elections by significant margins, or did not get to contest them. There are 230 Labour MPs; on 28 June, 172 of ...”

“... peasant who, having stumbled on political power, is unsure how to wield it. Reporting on Michael Portillo’s visit as defence minister to Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria and Macedonia in 1996, Anne Applebaum (coincidentally, for the Evening Standard) has a good old chuckle: Up and down the red carpets he walks, Her Majesty’s aircraft just behind ...”

“... was a brilliant place in Todd’s day, the staff including Patrick Blackett, Willis Jackson, Michael Polanyi and the historian L.B. Namier. When the war came, Todd was made chairman of the chemical committee responsible for the development and production of chemical warfare agents. After the war I served under Todd on a committee that had to make ...”

“... may be yet. The closest parallels to Aids in epidemiological terms are syphilis and Hepatitis B. Michael Adler, in Aids and the Epidemics of History, lists the sudden appearance of syphilis (at the end of the 15th century), its asymptomatic carrier state and predominantly sexual means of transmission as the chief points of similarity. Hepatitis B, as Baruch ...”

“... it to bubble and sweat in confirmation. Lifting the barrier at Gate 10 he warned me to drive straight ahead, without deviation, looking neither to left nor right. I’d find Mr Gibbons waiting at Gate 3A. (It was comforting, while cruising this reclaimed Tarkovsky end-zone, to see that ubiquitous boards for the big construction firms doubled as ...”

“... or ‘straight-horned’, according to where they appear in the line of verse rather than where, or if, they appear on the ‘wine dark’, ‘grey’ or ‘loud-roaring’ sea: the Greeks’ ‘swift’ and ‘seafaring’ ships are beached throughout the ...”

“... his schtick made room for the idea that he was a lovable old fraud.Riesman’s biography isn’t a straight-up demolition job. It includes a photograph of its author as an adolescent ‘circa 1998’ getting Lee to sign a comic, and aims for the tone of a fan who’s trying to be generous about his sometimes disappointing findings. Riesman doesn’t always ...”

“... had “schematised” them to conform to his argument.’ There’s a line – though not a straight one – between these early-century episodes and the disputes over Haeckel’s pictures that broke out in the 1990s. One new element was introduced by academic biologists wholly convinced of the fact of evolution. A group led by the English embryologist ...”

“... verbal and narrative digression. Fiction never quite presents anything as simple as an absolutely straight Cratylic name, which instantly manifests a character and a nature in a word. In a narrative or a drama there is necessarily some delay between the revelation of a name and the manifestation of a character’s nature. Even in allegories – which it’s ...”

“... in the country’s history, contested by two sons of the light-skinned post-independence elite: Michael Manley, the leader of the social democratic People’s National Party, and Edward Seaga, the leader of the conservative Jamaica Labour Party. The Jamaican system of ‘garrisons’ – social housing estates, usually built over bulldozed shantytowns, run ...”

“... unit. Some of the stories obtained this way were trivial, though intrusive: George Michael wept in his jail cell, for example, or a male British Airways worker secretly wore high heels. Others were more serious: security lapses at Heathrow, or equipment shortages in Afghanistan. Almost anything could be obtained if the offer was big enough: in ...”

“... on the incoming secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, and Trump’s now ex-national security adviser, Michael Flynn. The rhetoric emanating from US politicians and media commentators too seems to be drawn from another era. In November, a murky online group called PropOrNot went full McCarthy by releasing ‘The List’, designed to name and shame – or indeed ...”

“... not being ingratiating enough or trying to explain what the ‘drain problem’ was and graduating straight to the frenzied banging on the door; ‘your boyfriend’ didn’t help either. Like all crooks he was affronted when his honesty was questioned, if only because it implied a criticism of his performance. 4 February. I don’t imagine that my old Oxford ...”

“... have in common. He happened once to mention what he (as a head of department) pays new recruits, straight out of university: ‘45k a year, with a bonus of between ten and twelve grand guaranteed.’ I pointed out that in many cases that would mean these 22-year-olds would be earning more than the heads of department in the universities they’d just ...”