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“... usually a touch of Irish, and of facile sentiment bred by the very hardness and emptiness of the bush; and like the west Tasmanian jungle the tales were not so much tall as horizontal. Henry Lawson, who died in 1922, became the doyen of the story business, and his walrus-moustached face even appears on the Australian ten-dollar note. As Murray Bail ...”

“... say Messrs Cockerell, Hennessy and Walker, a trio tried in the ways of Fleet Street and Shepherds Bush. The massage has become the message. The accusation is by no means new, though those principally involved in communication between government and governed have always bristled at its airing. They have reacted as if confronted by some paranoid fantasy of the ...”

“... the king of insults. He’s been pretty good at it: ‘Little Marco Rubio’, ‘Low Energy Jeb Bush’, ‘Birdbrain Nikki Haley’ doomed them in the primaries. But Kamala Harris had him flummoxed. He tried recycling some of the old Hillary Clinton epithets – ‘Crooked Kamala’, ‘Lyin’ Kamala’ – but they didn’t stick, since Harris is ...”

“... awareness of the circumstances of the eastward push of Nato after 1990. President George H.W. Bush, in return for a united Germany, had promised that Nato would expand ‘not one inch eastward’; and the evacuation of this pledge in the years that followed, under Clinton, the younger Bush and Obama, has rightly been ...”

“... malice. Vincent Price was too camp to be really alarming, even as the witchfinder general. Peter Lorre was heartbreaking as a child murderer. James Gandolfini, playing an incorrigibly mean-minded godfather for seven years, strangely held on to the affection of most of his mass audience. James Cagney had his moments of deadpan nastiness, but there’s ...”

“... bel ami, Anax – presumably short for Anaxagoras (or is it Anaximander, even Anaximenes?), and Peter Mir – part ‘rock’, part ‘world’, part ‘peace’ (the last two Russian derivations, as Mir himself is quick to tell us). Could it be that Moy and Mir are to echo personal pronouns: as ‘me’, in French, and ‘to me’, in German? The ...”

“... of black-market catering and gambling in the Pacific theatre) is a well-executed attack on Bush-style Greatest Generation sentimentality. What matters, though, is his contribution to the story’s pacing. His attraction to Evangeline – she appeals, we’re told, to the side of his brain that he normally devotes to blackjack – mirrors a reader’s ...”

“... only a few months in office. The best account of Putin’s origins in these three books comes from Peter Truscott. He can be an annoying writer, pausing often to puff out his feathers and crow about how well he knows the great and good, or to gloat over the boring protocol details of state visits at which he was present (Truscott was an MEP, with excellent ...”

“... her and very like his ex-wife to keep a bloke in hand when the one she wanted was still in the bush. Everyone had expected their marriage to be a disaster. It was and it wasn’t. ‘Saturday,’ Ms Skelton tells us, ‘was the gayest day of the week.’ In the morning they shopped, then they had lunch, then they quarrelled. After that, they did some more ...”

“... dismiss the notion of civil defence against nuclear attack as absurd. Twenty years ago or more, Peter Cook in Beyond the Fringe made a delicious mockery of the notion that you should get into a paper bag in order to protect yourself against nuclear fall-out, and the Government’s recent pamphlet, ‘Protect and Survive’, caused both protest and ...”

“... through’. What the white men saw as the meaningless habit of ‘Walkabout’ was a kind of bush-telegraph stock-exchange, spreading news of commodities and availability among peoples who never saw each other, and might even be unaware of each other’s existence. Since goods were potentially malign, they would work against their possessors unless they ...”

“... hostility to Clark was demonstrated by two incidents not long after his death. In August 1993 Peter Ryan delivered, in the conservative journal Quadrant, an extraordinary attack on Clark’s six-volume History of Australia, which he had shepherded through publication at Melbourne University Press. He was, he said, ashamed to have published it: Clark was a ...”

“... could use the American military to promote its values. The subtitle of The Good Fight (2006) by Peter Beinart, the then editor of the New Republic, insisted ‘Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again’. ‘It’s time to think of torture,’ Newsweek declared a few weeks after 9/11. ‘Focused ...”

“... tide him over during his time in government. In December 2003 the administration trotted out the Bush family consigliere, James Baker, the consummate oilman, as special presidential envoy to restructure Iraq’s $130 billion debt. Baker’s law firm represents Halliburton; Baker Hughes, his oil-services company, was promised the contract to restore ...”

“... of foreign statesmen to uncover their nefarious designs. One had entered the mind of President Bush, and then reconfigured the intentions of one of his advisers so that whatever hideous plan the US had hatched failed to come off. The message was clear: if the secret services could see into Bush’s mind they could ...”