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“... between the upper and the lower cases. Almost everyone is some sort of nationalist, including even Michael Forsyth, the new Tory Secretary of State for Scotland. In retreat, the Conservatives have discovered that true Unionism awarded Scotland just as much nationalism as was good for it, via Scots Law, institutional autonomy and new devices like the National ...”

“... 1960s, a café on the island of Capri. She was doing the Times crossword. Greene and his friend Michael Richey came in from Mass at the church across the square and she overheard them at a nearby table fumbling for a line of Robert Browning’s ‘The Lost Mistress’:Tomorrow we meet the same then, dearest?May I take your hand in mine?Mere friends are we ...”

“... through the advantages of ‘torture-lite’ in a cover story. In the New York Times Magazine, Michael Ignatieff, biographer of Isaiah Berlin and professor of human rights, exhorted Americans to embrace their imperial destiny and offered his own suggestions for ‘permissible duress’. Even the New Yorker, fastidiously aloof from Beltway schemers during ...”

“... where he worked in a New York bookshop and made useful contacts – for example, with Dwight Macdonald and Mary MacCarthy. Soon he was teaching at Bard College. Remarried – his opponents say bigamously – he went to Boston and taught at the Berlitz School. He registered for the PhD at Harvard, became a teaching assistant in Reuben Brower’s famous ...”

“... that or return the publisher’s advance), calling his debut Doings and Undoings. The columnist Michael Kinsley once observed that Al Gore was an old person’s idea of a young person, and Podhoretz was an old critic’s version of a young critic, publishing in the proper publications and bemoaning hairy barbarians like the Beats (‘The Know-Nothing ...”

“... to go to Berne to attend a convention of European socialists, whose delegates included Ramsay MacDonald and Arthur Henderson, and which produced nothing. The convention was designed as a continuation of the regular prewar gatherings of the Socialist International, at which various factions had squabbled and bickered before declaring their unshakeable ...”

“... obsessed with the First World War. Everybody knows Pat Barker, of course, but there’s also Lyn Macdonald – a former BBC producer whose dense, addictive, exhaustively researched oral histories of the war (1914: The Days of Hope, 1915: The Death of Innocence, Somme, They Called It Passchendaele, The Roses of No Man’s Land, To the Last Man: Spring ...”