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“... he said, became ‘my true religion’. A tempestuous first marriage to the feminist writer Margaret Walters – over which his book casts a benevolent un-real light – sent him first into hiding in North London and finally back to America, where he fell in love, married and, in his late sixties, became a father for the first time. A few months before ...”

“... those traits which are the very antithesis of modern republicanism’. On the other hand, Dennis Kennedy has just described the Northern Irish state under Unionism as a ‘democracy’. The statelet was not a democracy, it was a holding operation which its founding fathers, Carson and Craig, thought would last only thirty years beyond 1921. It’s high ...”

“... a pension of $200 a month. The Petrov episode was possibly in Gorbachev’s mind when he first met Margaret Thatcher at Chequers on 16 December 1984. Thatcher’s papers minute what he told her: ‘Mr Gorbachev argued that if both sides continued to pile up weapons this could lead to accidents or unforeseen circumstances and with the present generation of ...”

“... they need to make geographical and linguistic journeys, to migrate and cross-pollinate. A.L. Kennedy said last year that if Theresa May thinks that ‘to be a citizen of the world is to be a citizen of Nowhere,’ then Nowhere was the country, the world, to which she was proud to belong. The place of literature is a country of the mind – ‘a country ...”

“... juice. When we sat down he said something nice about a book of mine. It was a trick he got from Kennedy: always praise the book by an author that other people find difficult. ‘I’ll never win the Nobel Prize, you know,’ he said. ‘Why are you so sure?’ ‘Because I stabbed my wife.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘No, they won’t give it to me.’ He wanted to talk ...”

“... Select Committee inquiry – the longest in history, longer than similar inquiries into 9/11, the Kennedy assassination and Pearl Harbor – had managed to come up with nothing. Nevertheless, they all quoted the same line from Clinton’s testimony to the committee, ‘What difference at this point does it make?’ as indicative of her heartless obliviousness ...”

“... is adaptable to any number of wistful daydreams – had Lincoln not been assassinated, or Bobby Kennedy – or more sombre fantasies, like Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, in which Germany and Japan win the Second World War and divide the US between them. But these historical variants are not genuine time-travel narratives on the order of ...”

“... Temple Grandin’s 1986 memoir, Emergence: Labelled Autistic, he thought Grandin’s co-author, Margaret Scariano, must have written it. ‘The autistic mind, it was supposed at that time, was incapable of self-understanding and understanding others and therefore of authentic introspection and retrospection,’ Sacks wrote. ‘How could an autistic person ...”

“... John Birt and Greg Dyke eras, the consistent impetus came from government. It’s no surprise that Margaret Thatcher wanted to take on the BBC – if anything, the surprise is how long it took her. (In her first term, Thatcher’s main concern was with BBC coverage of Northern Ireland.) By the time of her 1983 re-election, she had succeeded in taming Labour ...”

“... Athos peninsula, when he looks up and sees the first Sputnik coursing across the sky. When J.F. Kennedy assumes the US Presidency in 1961, Lindqvist is studying in Peking, living near Communist Party HQ, and only vaguely aware of the numerous US hydrogen bombs then targeted on him. In 1964, his wife is pregnant and his dissertation in comparative literature ...”

“... Harold Macmillan has a passage in his memoirs recalling the worries he expressed to President Kennedy over the imminent failure of the capitalist system, beaten not just by Yuri Gagarin in Soyuz One, but by the guarantee being offered to the Soviet people of a higher general standard of living. Even in the early Eighties, those who wished to be ...”

“... civil engineering achievements. Look at anything deriving from the key icon of the era, Margaret Thatcher, hard hat perched on hard hair, giving her blessing to Paul Reichmann, as they gloat over a scale-model of the future city of glass. My spirits were high. The Dome (or ‘Doom’, as displaced locals spoke of it) was a Bunyanesque target, a ...”

“... of racism from were a few Mafia bosses, and the dependably unpleasant monster-patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy. Jacobs paraphrases the Rat Pack’s foreign minister without portfolio, Dean Martin: ‘Wops, nigs, hebes, what the fuck was the difference? We were all up against the wall and fucking well better stick together.’As with Elvis Presley and Charlie ...”

“... wanted to go over this last weekend,’ said Midgley. ‘I would have gone over if your Margaret hadn’t suddenly descended.’ ‘You knew they were coming. They’d been coming for weeks. It’s one of the few things Mother’s got to look forward to.’ Mrs Midgley’s mother was standing staring out of the window. ‘Don’t blame our ...”

“... time and ought to have grown out of such silliness, another notable casualty of which was Jackie Kennedy, with whom Adlai Stevenson asked the cast of Beyond the Fringe to supper in New York in 1963. They went and I didn’t. Never spelling it out to myself, I clung far too long to the notion that shyness was a virtue and not, as I came too late to see, a ...”