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“... to leave Camp Abu Naji and travel in a north-westerly direction, seeking to prevent the enemy’s retreat from an area under Coalition control. Guardsman Wakefield was told to provide top cover in the second of two ‘snatches’ – a V8 Land Rover, lightly armoured – which would travel the road out of Amara in the dark. Sergeant Ian Blackett was in the ...”

“... day. From the level of noise as the call centre handlers walk in, they can often guess what’s happening across the country. Bad weather causes a surge in the number of calls: a dense, chattering sound. A terrorist attack is loud. But less dramatic worries are quieter and more frequent: anger at a lost connection, sorrow for a family member who’...”

“... across generation and race. But the enthusiasm he roused, the very force of his rhetoric, so one argument runs, has at moments appeared to be something of an illusion, or even his Achilles’ heel. Despite the passage of the healthcare bill, it remains to be seen whether rhetoric can fully triumph over the crushing anomie of state bureaucracy and the ...”

“... later, there was singing – ‘The Internationale’, peasant war songs, the ‘Soviet Airmen’s Song’ – with intervals of heavy silence. The red flags and banners could not dispel the greyness – of the shadowy buildings, the sky, the crowd – or the realisation that ‘the inevitability of world revolution’ had been postponed, that what faced the ...”

“... In​ 2006, the British Library bought a huge archive of Angela Carter’s papers from Gekoski, the rare books dealer, for £125,000.* It includes drafts, lots of them, a reminder that in the days before your computer automatically date-stamped all your files book-writing used to be a clerical undertaking. It has Pluto Press Big Red Diaries from the 1970s, and a red leatherette Labour Party one, tooled with the pre-Kinnock torch, quill and shovel badge ...”

“... of Belgians weren’t proud to be Belgian, and that surveys revealed Belgians to be the world’s least patriotic people. Statistics like these make me proud to be Belgian, but they also miss the point, because Belgium is something of an abstraction even to Belgians, whose sense of cultural and linguistic belonging starts at the regional level rather than ...”

“... migrant children, they sleep on a concrete floor with a single blanket, often made of mylar. It is so crowded that the older children try to sleep standing so that the younger ones can stretch out. The lights stay on 24 hours a day. They wear the clothes they arrived in, days or weeks or months before. They rarely have ...”

“... It’s impossible​ to discuss new developments in money without thinking for a moment about what money is. The best place to start thinking about that is with money itself. Consider the UK’s most common paper money, the English five or ten or twenty quid note. On one side we have a famous dead person: Elizabeth Fry or Charles Darwin or Adam Smith, depending on whether it’s a five or ten or twenty ...”

“... hidden but perhaps not for ever, is what this unconventional biography means by ‘memory’. Not so much memories as things forgotten and found again. Remembrance.Anyway, Nicodemus, my 17th-century religious fanatic, was making his way from the Midlands to the Fens – to Ely, in fact, because he had a vision that the fenland marshes were the place of ...”

“... class; had an elite education in the West; lacked religious beliefs; enjoyed many an affair. So much is well known. Politically more relevant was the peculiar nature of his relationship to Gandhi. Inducted into the national movement by his wealthy father, a pillar of Congress since the 1890s, he fell under Gandhi’s ...”