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“... the US commander in Iraq, prepares to report to Congress on 15 September on the success of George Bush’s ‘surge’, Bush himself is trying hard to talk it up and to discredit the policy of withdrawal. In a speech on 22 August to the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention, he resorted to the new and risky strategy of using the example of the ...”

“... Donald Davidson has this year been George Eastman Visiting Professor at Oxford: only the second philosopher to hold the august position (the first being W.V. Quine, a teacher of Davidson’s at Harvard and his greatest philosophical influence). This honour reflects his present stature in the academic world. Last year he was the subject of a massive conference held in New Jersey, organised by the indefatigable Ernie Lepore ...”

“... In an introduction to his Collected Film Poetry Tony Harrison recalls working with the director George Cukor on a ludicrously conceived and commercially unlucky movie version of Maeterlinck’s play The Blue Bird. The work starred Jane Fonda as Night, Ava Gardner as Luxury, and Elizabeth Taylor as Queen of Light and Maternal Love. You can see where the ...”

“... into American life. ‘I want to let everyone know how much I love the USA,’ she wrote from Baker High in Columbus, Ga, in 1963. She did very well at school, and later at college. She also engaged with passion in the civil rights movement, came under the influence of Thoreau and the New England Enlightenment, worked as a volunteer in the Presidential ...”

“... My tallness and bad reputation only got me nasty male parts at school – the Dragon versus St George, the Red Death, Shylock (at 12), Malvolio and Dr Chasuble. A local boys’ school gave me a couple of good female Shakespearean roles, though. Next came Prince Charming in suspenders at Art School – luckily all the audience was drunk – and three ...”

“... the present volume address themselves. One quickly becomes aware of contradictory impressions. Leo Baker, who knew Lewis as a fellow undergraduate, affirms that he showed ‘a single-minded determination to get the highest class in the examinations’ and ‘was not a laughing man and did not often indulge in wit’. But others report Lewis as laughing often ...”

“... Hammersmith and City is not discussed, although it’s claimed, for some reason, that Baker Street station ‘lifts the spirit’.) There is an early 17th-century description of Londoners ‘roasting slices of buttered bread . . . ‘This is call’d “toast”’ followed a few pages later by Dickens’s praise of sandwiches as ‘one of our ...”

“... from our responsibilities towards each other. He spoke fluently and agreeably, without passion. George W. Bush had lately ignored the advice of the Baker Commission to withdraw from Iraq, and had ordered the ‘surge’ of additional troops headed by General Petraeus; there was a feeling close to despair among the arts ...”

“... landslide in American political history, winning 49 states. His Democratic opponent, Senator George McGovern, took only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. It was in the early months of 1973 that the Watergate scandal assumed political significance. In February the Senate established a committee, chaired by Sam Ervin, a Democrat from North ...”

“... engage a rather directionless European like Logan. They conversed. The Indian, whose name was George and who was a Christian, immediately desired to help Logan in his search for the Bengali primer. The Englishman did not particularly desire any company, but on the other hand he hadn’t the heart to refuse such an unselfish offer. Yet – he was still ...”

“... dignitaries.’ Frenchness overrode blackness: Paris, adopted home of James Baldwin, Josephine Baker and Richard Wright, was a paradise compared to Jim Crow Alabama. But when Davis went there, the summer after Kennedy wowed the Elysée, she saw ‘racist slogans scratched on the walls of the city threatening death to the Algerians’: they didn’t have it ...”

“... returned to office as foreign secretary in the wartime coalition government led by David Lloyd George. The British government would ‘view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object’. Although there was realpolitik behind the Balfour ...”

“... and enterprising, and are themselves a study in social and geographical mobility. His brother George Marsh rose from a humble navy clerkship to occupy the position once held by Samuel Pepys. In 1755 he secured for Milbourne a senior administrative post at the port of Mahón in Minorca. It was a huge rise in status and income. Once on the island, Elizabeth ...”

“... It took him through the war, and it played a part in my coming to be. My mother, Constance Mary Baker, was born on 9 March 1891 in 44 Gordon Square, the illegitimate daughter of William Henry Baker, who had a highly profitable career as a speculative builder of the vast rambling pubs that made late Victorian London a city ...”

“... seemed improbable for a future novelist. Persistent rumours that she was not the daughter of George Frederic Jones but the illegitimate offspring of a Scottish peer or an English tutor clearly attest to a sense that there was something otherwise inexplicable about this ambitious daughter of Old New York. Her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), says ...”