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“... inflected, full of tiny, rapid, almost imperceptibly subtle flickers and changes of hue. Richard Holmes gives one of the accounts of biography I like best: the writer will never catch their subject, but might describe the pursuit of that fleeting figure. I would like to let her go.Among recent books consulted in the writing of this ...”

“... and self-discipline, and a deep hatred of the United States and the Western way of life. As Richard Hofstader and others have argued, for more than two hundred years this kind of combination has always acted as a prompt for paranoid and reactionary conspiracy theories, most of them groundless. Now the threat is real; and for the foreseeable future we ...”

“... desire to build a ‘Brasilia of the North’ on top of the Newcastle town centre laid out by Richard Grainger in the 1830s. It is urbanity in and of itself that attracts Hatherley. On his road trip to Glasgow he remarks (one assumes the humour is unintentional) that the first thing he notices in the purlieus of the motorway is ‘space ...”

“... of the Blue Carbuncle’, which opens with a diamond found in the craw of a Christmas goose. Holmes begins at the end and works towards the beginning, following in reverse the steps the goose and its prize must have taken, all the way back to the original theft. It’s very plodding. But the peculiarity of the hard-boiled detective thriller is that it ...”

“... press and an independent judiciary); by 1992, it was 35 per cent. He began his piece by quoting Richard Holbrooke on the previous year’s Bosnian elections: what if free and fair elections put in power ‘racists, fascists and separatists’? In The Light That Failed (2019), Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the ...”

“... Elvis Presley’s top half on the Ed Sullivan Show; John F. Kennedy’s live debate with a melting Richard Nixon; an early episode of I Love Lucy; a dinner-table scene from The Waltons; Neil Armstrong’s One Small Step; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald; the pilot show of Roseanne. Each viewer wore headphones; all you could hear was the giggles and gasps. On ...”

“... Maxwell is trying to buy a 10 per cent share in Fleet Holdings from the, Australian tycoon Robert Holmes a Court for £15.4 million, while another bidder – it’s not clear whether or not he is a rival to Maxwell – is an Egyptian financier: Dr Ashrat Marwan, son-in-law of the late President Nasser and confidant of the late President Sadat, has been ...”

“... prefer this arrangement. ‘What Congress wants isn’t power so much as deniability,’ Stephen Holmes has suggested. It is less interested in claiming a president’s successes than in disowning his failures. ‘He is sovereign​ who decides,’ in the words of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, and the American president’s bomb power is one of the purest ...”

“... A sentimental glow surrounds the Emancipation Proclamation, but in fact, as the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, it possessed all the ‘moral grandeur of a bill of lading’. It contained no criticism of slavery and did not free all slaves; the legal status of at least 800,000 slaves was not affected. The proclamation did not free those held ...”

“... as the baby’s middle name, and who gave the child the surname of her estranged husband, Richard Aldington, though he was not the father.But let’s back up: Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1886, the only daughter and second child of the second marriage of Charles Doolittle, professor of astronomy and mathematics and Civil War ...”

“... is a direct result of that unforgettable, unforgivable, life-shattering Tuesday morning. Stephen Holmes New York Islam was a medieval religion that had managed to stumble on into the 20th century. This was the view held in the 1950s by academic pundits in the West, such as Alfred Guillaume and Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who wrote general guides to Islam. The ...”

“... reading’ of the expert, but with the hooked absorption of, say, the Dickens or the Sherlock Holmes fan. Lowell appears himself to have been an ardent Dickensian, and the best things in what is otherwise a rather stagey unfinished essay he wrote on ‘Art and Evil’ is an inspired commentary on Mrs Gamp as a detailed ‘life study’. There is certainly ...”

“... with much detail, and walk-on cameos by ascertainably ‘real’ 1990 guests – John Major, Richard Rogers, Neil Kinnock and, of course, the richly despised Howard Jacobson. Francis Jay gives an impromptu television interview in which, with all the authority of one who has studied deconstruction at Sussex, he dismisses the shortlisted candidates as ...”

“... he is unafraid to confront powerful enemies because he has nothing to lose. While Sherlock Holmes just wants to find out who did it, Father Brown is a detective with a cause, using his lightning perception of the real facts to explain to the villain that all is known, and to hear his confession before any suicide or further crime can be ...”

“... me try now to apply them in the British context. Consider first the case of the Crossman Diaries. Richard Crossman kept the diaries while a member of the Cabinet, as his colleagues were aware. After his death they were edited, a first volume was prepared for publication and serialisation began in the Sunday Times. The Crown brought a civil proceeding to ...”