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“... looks as if it will outlast the Obama presidency, and if it does the largest single reason will be Obama’s choice of Robert Gates as secretary of defence. Gates worked under William Casey, the director of the CIA at the time of the Iran-Contra scandal. His nomination by Ronald Reagan to head the CIA was thwarted ...”

“... intended to elicit a prepared answer, but to trawl the everyday fragments and commonplaces gleaned by the children from parents and neighbours. The results prompted widespread hand-wringing in the serious press. Hitler’s birth was variously placed between the 16th century and 1933, his nationality given as Swiss, Dutch and Italian, his politics as Communist ...”

“... centres and youth projects in Blackburn and on Merseyside before taking what he assumed would be a quieter job, running council leisure activities in Burnley. ‘Of course we saw it coming,’ he writes of the 2001 riots. ‘The pity was that we only saw it coming afterwards.’Like the riots the same summer in Oldham and Bradford, the events in Burnley ...”

“... is the story, told in Philip Hoare’s 1995 biography, of Coward’s visit to the Court to see David Storey’s grittily realistic Rugby League play The Changing Room. His attention having been drawn to the male genitalia on display in the bath scene, Coward remarked: ‘13 acorns are not worth the price of admission.’ ‘Not worth the price of ...”

“... cosmologists’ struggles to measure basic features of our universe. Usually their answers could be trusted only to within a factor of two – that is, each measurement carried roughly 100 per cent uncertainty. Were galaxies receding from each other at such-and-such a speed, or twice that fast? The answer bore directly on how old our observable universe ...”

“... there. The two most familiar images of the men express the contrast eloquently. First, there is David’s brilliant portrait of Napoleon on his rearing charger in the Alps, seemingly master of the wind, rocks and sky; second, Chateaubriand’s acid description of Talleyrand hobbling into the presence of Louis XVIII with the help of Napoleon’s sinister ...”

“... a sudden shadow on the washed-out fleur-de-lis that paper the breakfast room; a form half-hidden by some other form, the angle of a door, perhaps, unless I think to make it a shutter, half-open, by which I leave you a single arm, single eye, single breast, a single link of the scallop- and-anchor motif on your ...”

“... glass, a circle of salt on the rim; she takes the scent of tequila first, then drinks. It might be years before she goes back to the book, those lines and layers, deaths and denials, that tallyman hero.   To be sightless and speechless, to be the last of the lost, to ...”

“... excellent of its own kind as we are likely to get – between them raise again the question posed by all attempts to write creatively about experience in conditions of extreme steepness and altitude: how to do it in ways that evoke the heart of the experience and don’t resort unduly to its more freakish terrors? The wonder of Joe Simpson’s escape back ...”

“... in a tepid bowl of liberal materialism? ‘Yes, yes. Go to a Madrid dinner-party and everyone will be talking about their new cars and the state of the economy.’ I did go to dinner-parties in Madrid and nobody tried to talk to me about cars. But no one wanted to talk about politics either. At the beginning of the decade old Francoists were still cursing away ...”

“... of a one-party state is that internal party disputes become the primary political battleground. By contrast, Theresa May leads a strikingly united party, at least for now. But her Commons majority is only 12. London has a Labour mayor and an increasingly left-leaning electorate. Despite the party’s recent revival in Wales and Scotland, the Conservatives ...”

“... what comes back, of what will settle, soon enough, and snag.*You wake from a dream where people go by rote. The clocks are setone at the right time, one to fool the Devil. The penitents come outhooded and gowned in holy white to flog themselves down the street.The rhythm of that scourging, their dumbness, the rack of bloodied feet.*If not a cellar, an ...”

“... enmyes now I have than hairs upon my hedd. (She stood her ground.) Then the byshopp sayd, I shuld be brente. * Anne, you are nothing to me. Only that you knew best how to unfasten your gown while they waited at the rack. Only that she was hard prest which I can’t now shake from my mind. Only that black flux flowed from you, that they let you void and ...”

“... The Hammock Your book is Summer by Edith Wharton. A smell off the garden of something becoming inedible. Between sleeping and waking, no real difference at all. There’s music in this, there would have to be: a swell of strings and bells becoming inaudible, note by note, before you latch on to it ...”

“... faces of my children staring out across the bay as if they might catch my eye, already whitened by sunlight and salt, between an acre of sea and an acre of sky. The answer –? The answer is –? The answer, I thought, is to slip this dead hand and swim for that stony spit and the serpentine rocks, where I fished myself out and stripped off laying my ...”