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“... consisted of one chief clerk, seven subordinate clerks and a messenger. The US minister to France, Robert Livingston, had no staff.When Trump moves into the White House on 20 January, he will take charge of around 2.8 million non-military federal employees working in hundreds of departments and agencies sprawled throughout the Beltway and beyond. Trump gets to ...”

“... When all the institutions of justice have shown themselves to be acting at all times in the service of the regime, few options are left. At the time of writing, Mohamad Soltan has been on hunger strike for 242 days. It is not clear how he is still alive. What is clear is that he is being kept in his cell when he should be in hospital. He cannot stand up ...”

“... interweaves deep historical insights with a strong composer’s inevitable prejudices – Robert Simpson’s impersonal challenge is spotlessly objective, sternly factual and, at the same time, unashamedly ethical. His scrupulous analysis of the Proms’ past yields a practical proposal as well as what already seems to have proved an indisputable ...”

“... your entrance as Osric through the French windows ... Arrive wet. Very dramatic. Polonius, use the service door.’ Elsewhere Guinness’s account of his patron can be tinged with a curious resentment. Perhaps Guthrie was never forgiven for exposing him as Hamlet at too early an age. There are exceedingly squalid descriptions of the Guthries’ insensitivity ...”

“... shocked a previous generation of political commentators – the thought that the British Civil Service is absolutely not to be trusted, that the ‘mandarin’ element provides next to no restraint on the politician’s standing inclination to mistake self-interest for the national interest, and that ‘confidentiality’ has become a cloak for a political ...”

“... use of sources in Arabic, then he is certainly correct. Hillenbrand has performed a great service in bringing together such a mass of hitherto underused and even unused material in a single capacious volume. Nevertheless, as she notes again and again, there are problems. When they wrote about their Christian neighbours, Arab chroniclers, geographers ...”

“... at Gibney’s office. The story is a rehash of The Outsider and seems to function mostly as fan service. It’s too long and contains some of the most redundant writing in the book. But it also showcases some of the best: Gibney’s relationship with her psychotically needy mother is beautifully rendered, as is a moving scene in which Gibney visits an uncle ...”

“... Larkin poem is liable to enter your head at least once a day. This morning it was ‘Order of Service’. It’s not as good as ‘High Windows’ or ‘Dockery and Son’, but it has the same doleful ebb. Searching in an old folder, I found an order of service for Larkin’s memorial at Westminster Abbey on 14 February ...”

“... who landed the fish, but only after twenty years of patient casting. When news came on the World Service on Sunday morning last March that the Sunday Times had started a serialisation of his week of interviews with the old spy, my reaction was one of relief: one had lost, but that was a pretty acceptable way of doing so. A couple of months later Philby was ...”

“... unions, the construction industry, great nationalised enterprises including the National Health Service, British Railways, the Coal Board and, finally, the Scottish Office. In doing so, it dramatically illustrates, not only the size and the virility of the corruption which spread into public life in the wake of the property bonanza, but also the complex ...”

“... effluent. Lord Normanbrook, a predecessor in the Highest Office of State now held by Sir Robert Strongarm, long ago decided this point: ‘any information arising in a government department is officially secret until it is officially released’ (Filchbag Peeper, The Law of Official Leaking, 1978, p. 209). Information was only in the ‘public ...”

“... Padua was not an independent city-state. The English College at Douai did not train Jesuits, and Robert Parsons, who was not a doctor, had nothing to do with founding it. Giordano Bruno was not born at Nova. Thomas Norton was not assistant torturer to Richard Topcliffe, but the other way round. There was no British army in 1586. Not all of this is ...”

“... Here was a then-regular sodality, consisting at different times of Kingsley Amis, Bernard Levin, Robert Conquest, Anthony Powell, Russell Lewis and assorted others, and calling itself with heavy and definite self-mockery ‘Bertorelli’s Blackshirts’. The conversational scheme was simple (I think it had evolved from a once-famous letter to the Times ...”

“... there. Diagnosed with ‘schizophrenia in obsessional personality’ as he embarked on National Service, he was subjected to ‘insulin shock therapy’: a potentially life-threatening coma was induced, then patients were brought out of it by being given glucose intravenously or through a nasal tube. Convulsions could ensue, and this form of treatment was ...”

“... mention at this point that in 1944 Pound was broadcasting from Rome for Mussolini’s radio service and had come to be seen as a traitor by the US government. In 1988, 16 years after Pound’s death, Humphrey Carpenter called Chapter 3 of his thousand-page Life of Pound ‘Suburban Prejudice’, a phrase used by the elderly poet to describe ...”