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“... one mental institution, the Central Bank, five hotels and ‘innumerable private homes’. Philip Habib, who was Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East at the time, witnessed the destruction of Beirut and telephoned its architect to remonstrate. As he later related to Fisk, Sharon said it wasn’t true. That damned man said to me on the phone ...”

“... In her successful campaign to become Colorado’s attorney-general, her funds came from Philip Morris, the Smokeless Tobacco Council and the Tobacco and Candy Political Action Campaign. When she was attorney-general, 23 states launched a suit against the tobacco companies but she refused to participate, saying that the cost of litigation would be ...”

“... are on their way to the sky. Ovens cremate fields of human cow. Ovens cremate fields of human snow. One has to go back to Sylvia Plath, born just a few years before Seidel, to find such nose-thumbing at atrocity. Sex is another subject Seidel treats with delicacy: ‘I hate seeing the anus of a beautiful woman./I should not be looking. It should not be ...”

“... he earned a living from the advertising agencies on Madison Avenue and shared an apartment with Philip Roth. In 1964 he designed the poster for Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. His pacifism and his posters against the war in Vietnam brought him to the attention of the FBI; he was blacklisted until 1993. He campaigned, too, on behalf of the civil rights ...”

“... so supposedly do more than half the nation.3 March. I get so much affection from people. With the snow still thick I force myself into wellington boots and venture forth, the first time for four days. Coming out of Shepherd’s, I am stopped by a black guy who says how much Talking Heads means to him and shakes my hand. Then, as I cross over, I’m hugged by ...”

“... Philip Larkin​ ’s ‘Church Going’, when I read it first, came as a relief. For once, someone had said something true, or almost true, about religion and its shadowy aftermath. The poem seemed to have a lovely assuredness and finality. The self-deprecating voice – resigned and a bit sad – was having an argument with no one ...”

“... Netherlands in the years between 1550 and 1672, from the dreadful spoliations of Charles V and Philip II to the deadly invasion of Louis XIV, a period comprising the Great Dutch Revolt, under the Princes of Orange and Nassau, the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) that resulted in the independent Dutch Republic, and the infamous Thirty Years War ...”

“... Cheney conceded, ‘but the most plentiful source of affordable energy in the country.’ Philip Clapp, president of the US National Environmental Trust, denounced Cheney’s plan as ‘an across-the-board attack on the environment’. Europeans began calling Bush the ‘Toxic Texan’. Scientists have all but unanimously condemned the new US ...”

“... conflicted and calculating man. The shock produced is akin to the revelations about Paul de Man or Philip Larkin. Lee Siegel is horrified by the racism in Shadows, by the ‘crude, alienated caricatures’ of blacks, gentiles and vulgar Miami Jews who ‘make Goodbye, Columbus look like “World of Our Fathers” ’. According to Hadda, the people who knew ...”

“... memory attached to smell: that of the chinchilla fur that belonged to my mother. A smell like snow in the air mingled with a little camphor. I believe that there is a sexual element in this memory although I cannot call to mind anything at all that might bear on this. According to the nuance of my memory of the fur it must have been some kind of ...”

“... of committees and research teams, of mandarins and boffins, as depicted in the novels of C.P. Snow (the original for at least one of whose characters is in this book) and in sundry Sampsonian Anatomies of Britain, which is commemorated in this volume. Here is an official prosopography of official Britain: civil servants write about civil ...”

“... the indispensable Eisenhowerist who naturally writes of the WSC-Eisenhower relationship, to Philip Ziegler, the tactful Mountbatten biographer who does for WSC and the monarchy, the contributors cover almost every imaginable WSC facet and interface, sometimes with considerable factual detail. The late D.J. Wenden provides chapter and verse and lots of ...”

“... in Norwegian. What you got out of these writers, like the wrong kind of leaf, or the wrong kind of snow (though these were native productions), was the wrong kind of novel. The 1980s in particular were Kundera’s decade. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), a highly conceptual and not really catchy title, relaunched the Kundera backlist: The Joke ...”

“... she accepted with typical good humour’. She might have been Captain Oates walking out into the snow. Of course she would have preferred to have won – who wouldn’t? Apart from anything else, the money would have come in useful. But how enraging it must be for writers who have never been shortlisted for anything to hear of the agony of the shortlisted ...”

“... the current blockbuster Dunkirk follow in this memorial tradition, as does the TV historian Dan Snow, when he advocates ‘augmented reality software’ to help us relive Passchendaele. These are national epics, reckonings wrought with all the latest resources of ‘full immersion’ – the equivalent of re-enacting the Passion of Christ in Seville’s ...”