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“... beautiful game’ can be used with little or no irony.Who in this very polarised world, with its strong sense of us and them, is the enemy? The ultimate culprits, the pullers of the strings, are ‘Western regimes’ and Conservative governments, a disappointingly standard conclusion, but then conspiracy theorists have exhausted all the more imaginative ...”

“... a British soldier was killed when he drove over an IED. 26 June. I met a company commander, Simon Butt from the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters, today. He described the area we’ll be entering when a big operation starts in a few days. It’s called the Green Zone, because it’s a solitary strip of fertile land about a mile wide that follows the ...”

“... here. This work, the result of five days’ collaboration in the basement of the Hôtel St Simon on the left Bank, has both oriental and occidental ancestry. The ceremonial meeting of poets to enact a ritual of elegance and refinement (more elegant and refined, perhaps, in nostalgic imagination than in humdrum reality) was admittedly an attempt to ...”

“... painting The Irony of the Negro Policeman; in a recent interview in the Marshall Project, David Simon, the creator of The Wire, noted that black police officers in Baltimore are sometimes more brutal than white officers, as if their skin colour makes them immune to racism against poor blacks. A vivid indication of how far – or how low – we’ve come is ...”

“... banal, welcome, necessary, continuous.’ I agree that if home is only a train away, exile is too strong a word. It might very well be ‘necessary’ for you to live somewhere else, somewhere you are needed or want to be. But it might also be necessary in the sense that you see no good alternative – it might be necessitated. Darlington isn’t a black ...”

“... and opportunity. There is plurality in plenty, and not merely of a superficial sort, in Simon Armitage’s Kid. It is a varied, versatile collection, showing considerable facility in its rhythmic variations and in its generation of often surprising feminine and half-rhymes. Armitage maps a degraded Post-Modern landscape, where the seedy can tip into ...”

“... been turned into novels by John Denis; and a third screenplay is undergoing similar treatment by Simon Gandolfi. In this curious world there are occasional legal hiccups. One such, not so much a hiccup as a cardiac arrest, recently befell HarperCollins when they were prosecuted and heavily fined at the insistence of Warwickshire trading standards ...”

“... Brought up Jewish and soccer-loving in the Netherlands, Simon Kuper has come to realise that he accepted too easily the myth of Dutch wartime heroism. The result is a long litany of hurt feelings, awkwardly transposed onto the world of soccer. He starts with a snapshot of interwar football, when international encounters were still few and English players enjoyed such unquestioned primacy that one German soccer writer referred to them as ‘a sort of Übermenschen ...”

“... Simon Heffer​ has had an idea. He has had them before, but he has fattened this one up into a book of enormous proportions. Huge quantities of factual narrative have been injected into it, in the hope of beguiling reviewers into acknowledging its historical respectability. For all that, the underlying argument is simple – the title gives it away ...”

“... a long stick – make the same case. His look of calm concentration suggests that patterns whose strong impact on us is immediate were the result not of sudden inspiration, but of adjustment and contrivance. As evidence of the difficulty of art, this may seem oblique, yet the general effect of the photographs of the old Matisse at work and of the old Picasso ...”

“... Fergusson feels and captures the importance of Orkney to Brown. She also communicates his strong, sometimes tortured spirituality and gives a good sense of his poetry. Fergusson is tempted at times by a version of Orkney as idyll: she could not have written this book were she oblivious to the beauty of the place through whose ‘eye of the ...”

“... the university has no record that he was ever a student). What is certain is that he had become a strong Korean nationalist. In 1944 he was arrested by the Japanese Police and imprisoned and tortured for anti-Japanese activities, but the outbreak of peace allowed him to return to Pyongyang, marry and, for the first time, proclaim himself the new ...”

“... court to abandon Versailles on 6 October 1789 – and calls for women’s equality were especially strong in the early years of the revolution. In 1790, the mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet demanded full civil rights for women: ‘Why should beings exposed to pregnancies and to passing indispositions not be able to exercise rights that no one ...”

“... bourgeoisie, and had led to the triumph of capitalism. Now, in these books by William Doyle and Simon Schama, we have two further reappraisals of this event written by British-born scholars. Both see the Revolution as a tragedy. Both argue that the initial impetus was not social or economic change. And both are very much historians of their time in giving ...”

“... up in palatial style here but so did Spencer’s ex-friend the convicted fraudster Darius Guppy; Simon Mann, the leader of the attempted mercenary coup in Equatorial Guinea in 2004; and Teodorin Nguema, the playboy son of the Equatoguinean dictator, Obiang Nguema, whom Mann was trying to overthrow. It was Thatcher’s involvement as a financial backer of ...”