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“... Society that – see the Register of Members’ Interests – paid for the culture minister, John Whittingdale, to visit Ukraine and Austria and provided the secretariat for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Ukraine; Firtash has been rewarded with an honour by the Duke of Edinburgh. The tour proceeded past the Russian Embassy off Kensington Park ...”

“... led al-Suri to assume, not unreasonably, that he and other jihadis had a tacit agreement with John Major that they ‘would never target Britain as long as the security forces left us alone’, and he abided by the ‘truce’. He spoke regularly to al-Zawahiri from a telephone box in the London suburbs, and came to serve as a liaison between British ...”

“... ran against Trump in the primaries; the two most prominent Republicans in the host state (Governor John Kasich and Senator Rob Portman); and scores of Senate and Congress members, governors and mayors nervously up for re-election, facing the prospect of having to defend or refute whatever would be Trump’s latest wacky pronouncement and losing voters either ...”

“... they aren’t overpowered by what they have to convey: they pick up mass, but – against the laws of physics – without decelerating, still at the speed of thought. The reader is exasperated by his own dull-wittedness, but struggles on. One often feels tempted to throw the whole thing at a computer and say: ‘Here, you do it.’ But that is the price ...”

“... were a blot on the landscape as that they were wasting cloth in defiance of war-time sumptuary laws? Or that the Vichy regime also lost patience with their zazous (the equivalent of zoot-suiters) and stood by while collaborationist youth groups beat them up and scalped them? The moral for today may be that when the chips are down the authorities will not ...”

“... but not with the same exuberance or obstinacy,’ he replies. But is Marianne more obstinate than John Bull, whom the Encyclopédie Larousse defines as ‘the nickname given to the English people to indicate their obstinacy’? He gives no answer. This book is not a work of comparative history. Intellectually, it is less powerful than his earlier ...”

“... trope.Then several things happened. The owner of Books and Bookmen, an operator by the name of John Dosse, took the opportunity of emulating the Masada faction and the Goebbelses, and committed suicide himself. I received a moist letter from the editor of the magazine, written in the tone of ‘I hope you’re satisfied now.’ I was accused in print, by ...”

“... of aristocratic families in decline, who retained pretentions to mighty connections (such as King John Sobieski) even as they subsided into ruin. His father Jan Norwid died in a debtors’ prison, and his mother died when he was only four. The Polish youth of the period was devoted to plotting and to fantasies of vengeance. In secret conventicles, forbidden ...”

“... were the triumphs of Faith. But Faith without wisdom is a dangerous thing. By the inexorable laws of history, the whole world pays for the crimes and follies of each of its citizens. In the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident out of which our civilisation has grown, the Crusades were a tragic and destructive episode. The ...”

“... in a scientific way of thinking is a ‘potential executioner’. The ‘temptation to apply the laws of evolution to society soon becomes irresistible. All men flow together into a “mass” subordinated to the “great lines of evolution”, while he, with his reason, dominates those “great lines”. He is a free man; they are slaves.’ This analysis ...”

“... to the state on a scale of generality that is positively Dostoevskian. Caleb Williams attacks the laws that keep poor men subservient to rich men, while also exploring the patterns of thought that make social change and real personal independence terribly hard to achieve. In a competition judged by Henry James, Caleb Wiliams would not be short-listed, but if ...”

“... with the frankly socialist movement associated with such names as Keir Hardie, Tom Mann and John Burns, but Bernard Shaw (in spite of his philandering, of which Beatrice strongly disapproved) was a regular guest at the famous Webb lunches. Manual workers were conspicuous by their absence. Possibly Beatrice never quite escaped from the conventional class ...”

“... as a setting for sculpture are the consequences of a single-minded pursuit by its main architect, John Russell Pope, of its underlying purpose, which was to provide a famous dealer in need of respectability, Lord Duveen, with a chance to display his munificence on a colossal scale. So the space seems designed to diminish any person or thing that enters ...”

“... the factors that condition it, and it is for the ruler to reshape a people by giving it the best laws that he or she can devise, and not, as Montesquieu had argued, the best it is in a condition to accept. Diderot could be eloquent in his denunciation of slavery, but he argued that the Russians should have taken advantage of their temporary occupation of ...”

“... up at the Spanish port of embarkation, ‘there was a tapping on the glass. We sat very still and John rolled down the window, letting in a blast of cold and salty air and a whiskery face with bright blue eyes.’ This sounds like the authentic memory of a child, and it could have happened anywhere. The adult narrator probably put the salt into the ...”