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“... commissioner, was published – it helped inspire Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. The relevant passage was an account of a conversation between Gladstone’s home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, and a police chief. While Clarke was being moved from prison to prison, Harcourt had refused to countenance the idea that he and the others were political ...”

“... so darkly as to make it unsurprising that Mack twice calls it ‘teasing’. The poet’s friend Charles Jervas painted it, probably in 1717, when Pope – aged 29 – was deep in his translation of Homer, a lengthy task that not only sealed his fame as the country’s leading poet (he was admired by good judges when still under twenty) but secured him the ...”

“... to Bernard Stora, his assistant on Le Cercle rouge, the point of ‘stretching’ a short passage of dialogue, or a scene, was to heighten its power, and slow down time. Melville’s acts of ‘dilation’ sometimes seem superfluous, even perverse, only to acquire meaning later on, like the languorous shot in Le Cercle rouge of a barmaid handing a red ...”

“... settled: the woman of independent means who has done quite well for herself, as Carter described Charles Perrault’s version of the figure, who waves wands and make things happen, transcending biological relatedness and bourgeois property law. Carter, Sage proposes, ‘birthed herself’ into that position through years and decades of intellectual and ...”

“... start on his watch). Stone was appalled that, along with the musical tribute to Abraham Lincoln, a passage from an earlier version on ‘teaching with integrity’ had been dropped from the address, which, he observed, contained no trace of a plea for academic freedom or any kind of civil liberty. One of Eisenhower’s first moves as president was to appoint ...”

“... denounce the treaty, while ensuring that Jenkins and others suffered no penalty for ensuring its passage. Restored to government in 1974, Labour went through the motions of renegotiating the terms Heath had secured from Pompidou, then staging a referendum on the revision. Wilson allowed his ministers to take whatever side they preferred in the ensuing ...”

“... country’ as opposed to ‘The World’; ‘VC’, ‘Charlie’, or even, respectfully, ‘Sir Charles’, as stubbornly opposed to ‘friendlies’, subdivided into US, ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) and ‘Free World’ – South Koreans, Thais, Filipinos, Australians, New Zealanders and, keeping low profiles somewhere, 30 each from Chiang ...”

“... in 1968. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, C. Wright Mills and René Dumont, Ernesto Sábato and Charles Bettelheim were all dazzled. For one visiting British delegation, Eric Hobshawm acted as Che’s translator.In the autumn of 1960, in search of economic agreements, Guevara made his first visit to the Soviet Union. Anderson reveals that there had already ...”

“... men to the devastations of the First World War, my eye fell on an open bible next to her. The passage was from Luke: ‘Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eye-witnesses and servants of the Word.’ Memory was the issue for Mr ...”

“... Divided Self. I remember it because it stuck out a bit beside the Edwardian set of the novels of Charles Dickens, picked up at a jumble sale or second-hand shop, and the books we actually read, stories by Rosemary Sutcliff, Alan Garner and Agatha Christie. When my eldest sister went to Birmingham University to study English in the mid 1970s the bookshelf ...”

“... as traversed by a series of boundaries, which, once crossed, could never be uncrossed, for their passage left an indelible mark: some knowledge was acquired, some experience gained, innocence lost, a new shamelessness entered into. One summer’s night, sitting in a shabby club in Crawford Street frequented by young burglars and male hustlers, a club of a ...”

“... on the stairwell,’ one fire officer told me, ‘and that … well, the stairs should allow safe passage, with hydraulic or weighted doors.’ The gas pipes that ran around the corridors and in and out of the stairwell passed through unsealed holes that allowed smoke and flames to pass through very easily. Residents who weren’t too high up, and who could ...”