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“... she quoted an exchange between Joan of Arc and her interrogators about her vision of the archangel Michael: ‘How did you know that it was St Michael?’ ‘By the way he spoke and his language of angels.’ ‘How did you know it was the language of angels?’ ‘I soon believed it was. I wanted to believe that it ...”

“... were not auspicious, and we were concerned from the outset that our composition – all white, almost all male, almost all lawyers and London-based – would undermine our ability to speak with any legitimacy. The Conservatives had come into government committed to tearing up the Human Rights Act, an early product of the previous Labour government ...”

“... played basketball, which made him different from his predecessors. Rhodes is a 5’ 7” balding white man, a worrier and a workaholic who tries to unwind with a drink and a cigarette – a natural fit for golf, in other words. But he was drawn to the basketball player. For eight years Rhodes worked as Obama’s deputy national security adviser and his chief ...”

“... of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin. As for London and Scottish Marine Oil’s Chris ...”

“... fifty of them are of the letter ‘i’, each in different handwriting in shades of grey on a white background; the other fifty, similarly presented, are of ‘j’s. If each image is 32 pixels high and 32 pixels wide, it can be represented as a single point in a 1024-dimensional space (322 = 1024), where each dimension corresponds to a pixel, and the ...”

“... places, in each other’s presence. That is the impression one gets from such excellent poems as Michael Longley’s ‘The Linen Workers’ and Derek Mahon’s ‘A Refusal to Mourn’. In 1962, in The New Poetry, there were poems of similar kind and distinction, such as ‘A Peasant’, by R.S. Thomas, and Iain Crichton-Smith’s ‘Old Woman’. All four ...”

“... Nothing was worth saving, and Wisner began to build a new network. Then, on 23 August 1944, King Michael of Romania ended his alliance with Germany.Wisner was ordered to Bucharest to ‘establish the intentions of the Soviet Union regarding Romania’. An advance party of nine agents had been sent ahead of him, including Beverly Bowie, who achieved the coup ...”

“... ideas from his communist and left-wing rivals: clean-up campaigns, anti-corruption purges and the white short-sleeved uniforms that were meant to convey the PAP’s purity. Meanwhile, his ‘Asian Values’ campaign and his 1980s eugenics programme – one of the few initiatives his citizens rejected – owe debts to Japanese fascism, and the PAP’s ...”

“... caught, in collusion with the Mafia, plotting to poison Fidel Castro’s cigars. Ronald Reagan’s White House was run to astrological time, and its chief spent his evenings discussing Armageddon theology with strangers. Oliver North recruited convicted narcotics smugglers to run the secret war against Nicaragua. George Bush recruited Manuel Noriega to the ...”

“... or almost here, and then it’s gone: politics as a dance of blind men thrashing the air with white sticks, while failing to land a single blow on a Struwwelpeter clown-king bent on slow-puncture abdication by photo opportunity, a different costume or a different country every night. This man changes the rules of the game if he is in danger of losing a ...”

“... the previous year that ‘sometimes you remind me of a gentleman in full evening dress and white gloves attempting to put something right with the kitchen plumbing without soiling his attire.’ It comes as no surprise when the great man announces that ‘Edimbourg is nearer to being my spiritual home than is Glasgow.’ Yet one of the many strengths ...”

“... literary era dominated by heap big novelists now facilely grouped as a cetacean school of Great White Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest ...”

“... to whomever was around or just people-watch. In this millennium, in cafés frequented by young white people, every customer seems to be silently staring at an Apple product, so that the places look and feel like offices. Even this phase may be on the way out. The next phase – of trying to keep customers from sticking around – has arrived. A food ...”

“... and an enemy of the Enlightenment, though he has changed his positive allegiances a good deal; Michael Sandel, like Charles Taylor and Pope John Paul II, makes a great thing of ‘identity’. They stress the difference between the way we are ‘constituted’ by our membership in a variety of communities and the ‘abstract’ individuals that thinkers ...”

“... wave away the menu and say: ‘No oil, no salt, no MSG, no colouring, no flavouring, no sugar, no white flour, no butter. What do you have?’ After the murder, with the newspapers running stories about the hunt for the ‘wolfman’, he starts eating piles of junk food. He also starts wandering around Chicago dressed as a woman, looking for a way of getting ...”