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“... diplomatic intrigues, particularly when they involve characters as colourful as Edgar Hoover or James Angleton. Wright describes how Angleton ingeniously contrived to enjoy simultaneously his three main hobbies of drinking, smoking and fishing. Having bought a stretch of river, he buried bottles of Jack Daniels at regular intervals in the river bed, so that ...”

“... kind so clearly and powerfully.The central actor in Everill’s story is Zachary Macaulay. A stern and uncompromising Scot, Macaulay lost his youth to alcohol and card tables before travelling to Jamaica, where years working as a plantation bookkeeper inured him – at first – to the horrors of slavery. It was only after converting to evangelical ...”

“... at a stroke’. 8. Shirley Williams joined Arthur Scargill on a mass picket at Grunwicks. 9. James Callaghan said: ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ 10. An experienced cabinet minister said in an interview: ‘I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might just as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly.’ Here are some of ...”

“... but it will be, it will be. Instead, poor Carmen took delivery of my recently published ‘stern account of literary, publishing and theatrical folk’. I was given a surprise party at, inevitably, Soho’s Groucho Club. Among the sixty-odd faces present was one I didn’t recognise. ‘We haven’t met,’ the smiling proprietor of the face, bearded ...”

“... Defence, was grounded after a sustained campaign by the tireless Scot. Again, he helped to defeat James Callaghan’s legislation designed to provide a devolved government for Scotland. But no occupant of 10 Downing Street has been the target of so relentless an onslaught at his hands as Mrs Margaret Thatcher. Now, with all the zeal of a Dickensian ...”

“... shortcoming is its lack of any full discussion of the volume which Kalstone is reported – by James Merrill, in an ‘Afterword’ – to have considered Bishop’s ‘in many senses’ greatest, Geography III. The story, perforce, breaks off just where some sort of climax and rounding-out might have been expected. Instead, Merrill supplies his own ...”

“... Jos Sedley in the final chapter of Vanity Fair, but her guilt is strongly implied. Is Henry James’s nameless governess in The Turn of the Screw a heroic and blameless victim of evil, or a deranged child-killer? In denying us certainty, James trades on the ambiguities inherent in her profession. Sheridan Le Fanu’s ...”

“... because we’re worried that if we start we will have no choice but to think about nothing else. James Lovelock, in his powerful and extremely depressing book The Revenge of Gaia, says this: I am old enough to notice a marked similarity between attitudes over sixty years ago towards the threat of war and those now towards the threat of global heating. Most ...”

“... justification for day-to-day plantation management. According to his reading, the duties of a stern but rational paternalism acknowledged profit-making as only one of many factors in a master’s routine calculations. The regime even developed a consistent, rational and gifted cadre of intellectuals to create a regional movement ‘graced by some of the ...”

“... much of a plot to this novel. It is more like Priestley’s English Journey, a travel book with stern thoughts. ‘We’ve got everything to fight for, but we don’t believe in God, so we can’t.’ Or, still using religious language: ‘If he had work, he was one of the elect. If he had no work, he was one of the damned – not even in Limbo.’ God ...”

“... been short of money, but it seems that in an odd way he was rather stingy. His first analyst was James Strachey, the translator of the Standard Edition of Freud. When Strachey’s wife, Alix, was living in Berlin enduring or enjoying analysis with Karl Abraham and making friends with Melanie Klein, James wrote to her ...”

“... why America? The answer seems to lie in the quixotic mind of bin Laden himself. What would the stern moralist Qutb, or for that matter a psychoanalyst, have to say about the family history of Osama bin Laden? He is one of 54 children whom his fantastically wealthy, self-made father had by 22 wives. His father found his mother, Alia – wife number four ...”

“... we enter The Monastery, all liberals have been removed. ‘I myself am a man of the system and a stern conservative, stubborn as a tomb,’ Prilepin wrote a few years ago in a column. ‘I hate democracy like the plague. I love the attributes of power, army boots and ...”

“... a pig’s back). We stare out along the coast to Tory Island, the home of the great naive painter, James Dixon. Below us Donegal is green, still, silent and peaceful. I’m too tired that evening to open either Himself Alone or The Idiot, and in any case I want to a make a start on a new book, a collection of short essays on single poems. I wish I’d packed a ...”

“... wasn’t written by Hilary Mantel or Antonia Fraser. It was written more than 140 years ago by James Anthony Froude, whose History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada put the Tudor show on the road. That wasn’t Froude’s only legacy. His Life of Carlyle, published in 1885, inaugurated modern biography, biography with ...”