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“... at ten to three/And is there honey still for tea?’ sitting at his window table in the capital of Berlin bohemianism, the Café des Westens, alias the Café Megalomania, where Expressionist poets, anarchists, vagabonds, occultists, visionary cranks and avant-gardists whiled away the hours. Soon the war swept them all away. Brooke had a nervous breakdown in ...”

“... was to bring the Pretoria regime to its senses – namely, sanctions. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in November 1989, the British Government continued for months to insist that it would take a decade or more to achieve German unity – little wonder that some in Bonn observed an uncanny resemblance between the name of our Foreign Secretary and the ...”

“... is quite convincing, although both are, perhaps for that reason, fascinating to read about. Edward Sackville-West is, on the other hand, absolutely convincing, wholly there as a personality. A study of the excellent portrait by Graham Sutherland, on the cover of this biography, tells us as much as its contents, well-compiled and elegantly-narrated as ...”

“... only once, but at the top of his form. A hundred thousand people had been assembled in East Berlin to hear him, on a rubbly wasteland off the Friedrichstrasse. Far off on a red-draped podium, a marionette in a baggy white suit whirled its fists and shrieked. Khrushchev was too angry to pause for his interpreter, and the loudspeaker towers around us ...”

“... more to talk about. Nevertheless, it is encouraging to find a volume as solid and responsible as Edward Peters’s Torture, which traces the history of torture from the extraction of evidence from slave witnesses in criminal trials to the Inquisition, and on to its use, after a brief interruption, in our century as part of the ideological wars of ...”

“... the photo of the English team giving the Hitler salute before their 1938 match against Germany in Berlin. Stanley Rous, the FA secretary, had decided this would be a good thing – after all, they had given the Fascist salute in Rome and that had gone down well. Kuper quotes extensively from the autobiographies of Stanley Matthews and the England ...”

“... in the world, with 14 cutters and 300 tailors (there are now 40), and branches in Paris, Berlin and Vienna. On Savile Row, clients enjoyed free claret, hock and cigars in the sumptuously decorated reception area as, making the most of interminable credit, they treated the premises ‘more like a club than a shop’. There was even an artificial ...”

“... advice, says Fleming, at any time. Autopsies had yielded some correlations of cause and effect. Edward Jenner (as well as developing the cow-pox vaccine) may have been the first to identify calcification of valves and arteries with angina. He was probably deterred from making this known by fear for his revered teacher, John Hunter, who was already suffering ...”

“... settling in Finland in 2004. His experiences on the road informed his short story ‘Truck to Berlin’, published in The Madman of Freedom Square (2009). The story gained new readers after the so-called ‘migrant crisis’ of 2015, which it seemed to foreshadow, and Blasim’s name began to appear on festival line-ups and reading lists alongside Viet ...”

“... the last thirty years is to compare the introductions to the first and most recent editions of Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward’s Guide to the Architecture of London. In 1983, they wrote of a city in decline, its population down by about a sixth from its postwar height. ‘London is cleaner and uglier than it was at the beginning of the century; but ...”

“... which were at their peak last summer, when the Guardian and others first got their hands on Edward Snowden’s documents – was that we’re all being watched all the time. Anything we do online, and any phone call we make, is potentially being analysed by the NSA and its friends. But, as Luke Harding discloses in his book on the Snowden affair, the ...”

“... outbreak of the Civil War, Duffy felt it necessary to write to John Chartres, representative in Berlin (and also temporarily in Paris), with the ‘serious criticism’ that a bulletin he had issued ‘extols Mr de Valera and his friends at the moment when they are wrecking the country’ and that he had reported favourably on an army meeting earlier ...”

“... tanks. By now my friends were speculating why the United Nations forces always acted so partially. Edward Said’s essay about the Palestinians with photographs by Jean Mohr, who worked with John Berger, is a wonderful book. Text and images illustrate one another. The book is calculated to nourish and enlarge our sympathy and our imagination in just the way ...”

“... blood. Percy’s brother Sidney had married Nelly’s sister Gretl and they took Nancy off to Berlin, where Sidney had found a job with a motion picture company; Eric was left in Vienna, boarding with a woman in exchange for giving English lessons to her son, and visiting his mother in one or another sanatorium. He was a cerebral, bookish child, living ...”

“... an invention that necessitates, and is caused by, an outlandish back story: an atom bomb fell on Berlin in 1946; the battle for Israel in 1948 was won by the Arabs; three million Jews were got out of Europe in time to escape the Nazis and are now living in the Federal District of Sitka, in Alaska, which granted them temporary asylum. Now, in 2007, the ...”