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“... out as a thriller for the penny magazines: it was first serialised anonymously in a new one, Robin Goodfellow, and then moved to the Sixpenny Magazine when Robin Goodfellow failed. But its popularity with readers from all classes led to its publication as a three-volume novel in October 1862, under the name ...”

“... World War generation, opened with the claim: Socialism is the watchword and the catchword of our day. The socialist idea dominates the modern spirit. The masses approve of it. It expresses the thoughts and feelings of all; it has set its seal upon our time. When history comes to tell our story it will write above the chapter ‘The Epoch of ...”

“... from human rights organisations for his military’s campaign against leftist guerrillas. The next day, one of Guatemala’s elite platoons entered a jungle village called Las Dos Erres and killed 162 of its inhabitants, 67 of them children. Soldiers grabbed babies and toddlers by their legs, swung them in the air, and smashed their heads against a wall. Older ...”

“... come near the top of the national hierarchy of thieves. They’re up there with Raffles and Robin Hood. People who don’t own large estates and pheasants tend to like poachers, because like Raffles they’re artisans – you can’t smash and grab a forest – and like Robin Hood they sock it to the system. ‘The ...”

“... disadvantages. The mood of discouragement is set by Mary, grieving over the death of her child, Robin: the title alludes to this, and there are seasonable and other references, though none of them – it seems a perverse kind of art – answer the simple question of whether Robin was a boy or a girl. Mary has time for ...”

“... In one of the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks Putin and Medvedev are compared to Batman and Robin. It’s a useful analogy: isn’t Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’s organiser, a real-life counterpart to the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight? In the film, the district attorney, Harvey Dent, an obsessive vigilante who is corrupted and himself commits murders, is killed by Batman ...”

“... I wondered whether the audience he was really addressing wasn’t the army rank and file. The next day, the former vice-president, José Vicente Rangel, told us that there had been a US-Colombian plot to infiltrate Colombian paramilitaries, including snipers, into Venezuela. The aim, he said, had been to create a national emergency: government members and ...”

“... responded immediately. That year, the State Department fired ‘perverts’ at the rate of one a day, more than twice the figure for suspected Communists. Charges of homosexuality ultimately accounted for a quarter to a half of all dismissals in the State and Commerce Departments, and in the CIA. Only 25 per cent of Joseph McCarthy’s fan letters complained ...”

“... different from the comment of Admiral Mayorga, one of Argentina’s dirtiest warriors: ‘The day we stop condemning torture (although we tortured), the day we become insensitive to mothers who lose their guerrilla sons (although they are guerrillas) is the day we stop being human ...”

“... Shakespeare country, and rain. In deepest Warwickshire, when light goes out of the day at three, there’s nothing to do but bring in the dogs and build a huge fire and try for the nth time to believe that ‘Shall I die?’ might be by the Bard. To get the ambience right, I fill a pewter mug with ale. A taper winks in the timbered hall ...”

“... rip in the knowledge that this was a World Service training film and would never see the light of day, even if, as seemed unlikely, this pair ever found their way back to Central London. Greenwich, on the cusp of its new prosperity, and ready as ever to exploit any opportunity to cram more visitors into a small riverside settlement that is already coming ...”

“... than at first appears. I learned little from this chapter except that Bonzo the chimp died the day before the premiere that made his (and Reagan’s) names. Real buffs will be impressed to find that Myrna Loy recently denounced the President on Legends of the Screen, saying that ‘he’s destroying everything now I’ve lived my life for.’ And what was ...”

“... her period of seclusion, she begins a grotesque photo-essay: a series of stills of dead animals (robin, rabbit, rat, mouse, rook, fox, frog, hare, hedgehog, badger), each of which provides the title for one of the novel’s ten chapters. Many of these grainy photographs are reproduced in the book; Frankie knows they’re not very good. Even the ...”

“... busy place. Like Nikolai Rostov, most soldiers experience it as strangely empty. Even on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, a British field artillery officer looking towards the German trenches could see ‘not a single soldier ... not a movement of any sort’. A British parachutist in combat in 1982 reported: ‘I didn’t really see any Argies ...”

“... the entire epoch of seconda prattica emanating from Monteverdi, so out of tune with its present-day status as to be quite disconcerting. Again and again the same viewpoint is voiced and varied: in the Britannica entry for Monteverdi himself, again in Gluck’s, again in one of the accounts of how tonality evolved, again in the account of what ...”