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“... suddenly pervaded the place. I could feel it stabbing through me. This was the CIGS. Thus Anthony Powell brilliantly evokes the dynamic personal impact of General Sir Alan Brooke in his novel The Military Philosophers. Brooke held positions of critical responsibility and as CIGS was titular head of the Army for the greater part of the Second World War, yet ...”

“... intolerable, unstoppable and, in war at least, indispensable. He was bred to it. His father, Sir Charles Jackson, was a Monmouthshire architect-developer, lawyer and politician who, among other things, built up a large collection of silver which virtually is the National Museum of Wales’s collection and bought shares in a then obscure Sunday newspaper ...”

“... the phenomenon of the Royal Joke during which people fall about in near-hysteria when Philip or Charles say something like: ‘If it rains today we could all get wet!’ People then queue up to tell the TV camera about ‘the Prince’s wonderful sense of humour’. More lies, always more lies. The cultural compulsion is truly strong. I was once at a garden ...”

“... for gallantry. This book has been put together from conversations recorded by John Miller and John Powell for the BBC. They were delightful broadcasts: talking off the cuff, Gielgud rambled backwards and forwards over his life; he rarely paused and then needed only the gentlest nudge to set him off again, bowling down the years. Cut together into a book, the ...”

“... away so determinedly at the mystery surrounding the novelist’s birth. Whether the songwriter Charles Mackay was her step-father or her father surely matters little. Illegitimacy, if it existed, was obviously something to be concealed and Minnie Mackay was not to be blamed for inventing an exotic ancestry. Elinor Glyn, her fellow practitioner, who wrote ...”

“... and literature available to Joyce: Ibsen, Shaw, Hauptmann, Freud, Have-lock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, Charles Albert, Otto Weininger, and many other rhetoricians of sex. The lore is informative, though it is bound to excite the reader into thinking that Joyce was permanently retarded in the matter of sexuality. Brown has a phrase or two from Finnegans Wake to ...”

“... tractable African-Americans can do well among the political elites in this country: ask Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice. But in any case Hillary Clinton is unlikely to stumble: she’s an alarmingly disciplined candidate. Barack Obama first came to national attention when he gave the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston. He was a ...”

“... muscular, Anglo-Saxon, Christian soldiers of the sort championed by Cecil Rhodes and Robert Baden-Powell. Thus the prolific G.A. Henty, who churned out more than a hundred boys’ adventures in a range of imperial settings, turned to the mutiny with In Times of Peril. His fellow adventure novelist Hume Nisbet’s hero Sammy Tompkins disguises himself as an ...”

“... of drunkenness. All this encouraged talk of eugenics and sterilising the feeble-minded. Baden-Powell set up the Boy Scouts because so much was wrong with society. Poor boys stole; middle-class ones knew no danger. A woman drowned in the Hampstead Ponds because the men nearby couldn’t swim. Boys’ teeth were so bad that they couldn’t eat hard biscuits ...”

“... the daylights out of the South so as to soften up the opposition before the main assault. Like Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist, like the conservatives and liberals who argued for war in 2003, and said that Saddam Hussein, the Hitler of our time, must not be appeased, and this mustn’t turn into Munich all over again, Adelman demanded ...”

“... efficacy of these tactics. Here is one example: in the 1984 elections, AIPAC helped defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to a prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns’. Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: ‘All the Jews in America, from coast to ...”

“... with the Civil Service and with the Treasury. Blair reveals that his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, overheard a phone conversation at the height of the crisis between the two Browns, during which Gordon warned Nick not to give in to Blair’s ‘presidential style’. It is a cliché of the Blair years, and not really true, that his was a presidential ...”

“... of the Sun. Relying on interest in the royals to sustain a bewildering amount of copy (CHARLES WON’T PAY FOR DIANA’S BRIEFS; WHO GRABBED FERGIE’S BAUBLES?) the paper blends gratifying scorn with a full appreciation of their entertainment value (HAVE YOU HEARD THE LATEST IN THE SOAP OPERA?) Over the past few months the Sun has questioned the ...”

“... The tired phrases playback in loops of hate. Once they were given an apocalyptic spin by Enoch Powell, and now they are smoothed by the in-flight rhetoric of hatchet-headed Essex men. The original keyholders of these terraces parroted the same sentiments, word for word, before decamping to the fringes of Epping Forest. An incoming tide of ...”

“... actors, but they share the fundamental belief – crucial to nationalist politics back to Enoch Powell and beyond – that cosmopolitan globalist elites are mobilising sections of the population against national majorities. Although this narrative is being pushed hard by the populist media, it’s patronising to assume, as Makin-Waite writes, that ...”