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“... strong language – like strong drink – is a way to alleviate despair. In 1930, John Brophy and Eric Partridge published a collection of British songs and slang from the war. They claimed that soldiers used the word ‘fucking’ so often that it was merely a warning ‘that a noun is coming’. In a normal situation, swear words are used for emphasis, but ...”

“... at all of what had gone wrong with their little project. Was there a single member of the Wilson Front Bench who could stand up for a second to the icy brilliance of James, a black product of British colonialism who had come back to slay every kind of illusion, including the illusions of black nationalism and Soviet fraternal aid? At the back of the ...”

“... of whom have been well served in recent biographies, Cobb was never a college head, and this may go some way to explaining his subsequent eclipse. It was a role for which he was epically unsuited, given his (very un-French) disdain for administration, his indiscretion and his legendary thirst. Heald’s introductory aside – ‘he liked a drink’ – is ...”

“... to see if they could force a few into life with a bucket of departmental fertiliser. Charles Wilson has argued that the main skill of the entrepreneur is the possession of ‘a sense of market opportunity combined with the capacity needed to exploit it’. The opportunities available in the North Sea since BP’s discovery of the West Sole gas ...”

“... of Labour heavyweights, from Benn himself to Barbara Castle and bruisers like Denis Healey and Eric Heffer. Its atmosphere derived from the lurid tales of spookery and skulduggery that emerged in the dying days of Harold Wilson’s premiership, when the longstanding suspicion that ...”

“... I: fatigued. Scand. narwhal, from the pallid colour. Yiddish, Russ. nudnyi: tiresome; nudnik. Gc. need “A friend in need is a friend indeed.” ’). In short, it chickens out of attempting to be a genuine tool of academic scholarship, where it would indeed be found wanting, but at the same time it is too top-heavy with philological ‘facts’ to tap ...”

“... the President, however, Doris Kearns Goodwin (following Presidential scholars Richard Neustadt and Eric Larrabee), defends the political virtues of Roosevelt’s ‘management style’. By multiplying advisers he broke free of White House insularity, the argument goes, and was put in touch with diverse – conflicting – points of view. To be sure, Doris ...”

“... and moral pressures, and rich in insights into their intricate interactions. He pays tribute to Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery, but finds its baldly economic reasoning in the end ‘mechanical and unsatisfactory’. In this story the central event is the French Revolution, one of many reasons why its bicentenary next year deserves to be taken due ...”

“... on bass, but the first thing we hear is the lugubriously reassuring voice of the producer, Tom Wilson, announcing ‘“Dime Store” – Take 1’. This is one of a number of unfamiliar early titles, for these are songs still in the making. Thus ‘She Belongs to Me’ is first slated as ‘My Girl’ and later as ‘Worse than Money’; and Highway ...”

“... forms of racial conflict. At the same time, America was preparing to enter the Great War. Wood-row Wilson lay half-paralysed in the White House; the socialist leader Eugene Debs was kicking his heels in an Atlanta prison cell; and an assortment of anti-war socialists and anarchist bombers were keeping J. Edgar Hoover and the Justice Department busy. In a ...”

“... affair. Comfort had no trouble making friends, but formed few close relationships, and in Polymath Eric Laursen speculates that he had married Harris in part because her love made him feel loveable. Now he started sleeping with Jane Henderson, an old friend of theirs (and Harris’s former roommate in Cambridge). Harris was blonde, rather formal and ...”

“... of the Scottish and international economy. Upper Clyde Shipbuilders was created by the first Wilson government – the book has a treacherous preface by Tony Benn – out of the wreckage of the old Fairfields yard. In 1971 it was allowed to go ‘bankrupt’ by the Heath Government. The work-force responded with ...”

“... mapping the path of the toys as they floated the oceanic currents. Newspapers picked up the story. Eric Carle, the writer and illustrator of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, wrote a children’s book about the ducks. And 13 years after the spill, by way of a pupil’s essay, the story drifted towards Donovan Hohn, then a teacher in Manhattan.Hohn quit his job to ...”

“... president, Robert Goheen, and drafted by Gardner Patterson, an economist at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Both men’s political instincts and diplomatic skills were tested to the limit when the report reached sceptical alumni, whose reservations were encouraged and amplified by Princeton’s director of ...”

“... 2001, after years of unhappiness and physical pain. He had been sitting in an armchair, watching Eric and Ernie on the television; my father popped out to get a prescription filled. When he got back, he thought my brother was sleeping, but he wasn’t. He’d been enjoying himself, my father said, laughing at the sketch involving André Previn. He had, my ...”