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“... and cultural models to be imitated across the globe. ‘The true test of a good government,’ Alexander Hamilton wrote, ‘is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.’ It is a test the United States and Britain have failed ruinously during the current crisis. Both countries had weeks of warnings about the coronavirus outbreak in ...”

“... writer’, and he cut some contributions by more than half. One enemy he certainly made was Alexander Balloch Grosart DD, who was invited to contribute several entries for the first volumes, principally on 17th-century divines. As early as October 1883, Stephen was complaining that he had ‘had my usual letter of abuse from that old fool ...”

“... University of Sussex in 1986. But she would like us, she said, to see Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander if we could, and to read ‘The Immortal Story’ by Isak Dinesen, ‘whom I have since discovered has become rather trrrendy’ (a film had just been made of Out of Africa, the memoir Dinesen wrote under her real name, Karen Blixen, starring Robert ...”

“... here in a tradition which includes the Rochester of ‘Upon Nothing’, Erasmus and More – the masters of both Swift and Pope – and ultimately Socrates. Pope’s Dunciad, which is similarly something other than prophetic, works by the same radical principle of subversion. It exposes worldly rituals of status, folly ‘high on a gorgeous seat’, all ...”

“... Nato members – to the north. To attack Ukraine, to intervene to defend Putin’s awkward client Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, to pivot to face Nato-member Latvia, to have soldiers sitting on their camp beds playing endless hands of durak: no doubt the Russian general staff has rehearsed all eventualities.It’s striking how many times, in the past few ...”

“... that before there can be solidarity, a little humility would help.Towards​ the end of 1826, Alexander Pushkin was playing chess with a friend who, as he put it, ‘knew a lot of the kinds of thing they study in universities while we were learning to dance’. The friend checkmated Pushkin with his knight and remarked: ‘Cholera morbus is at our ...”

“... was open to discussions on the hunger strikers’ demands if they would stop their fast. Their IRA masters would not let them do that, but they did start talking about terms for ending the protest. The talks broke down, but they had the effect of raising expectations among the families of the remaining hunger strikers that their lives might be spared. This ...”

“... writer, and length of life, might be expected to provide some co-ordinates. Yet even among modern masters there is little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two thousand pages. Kafka, who barely reached the age of forty, yielded only five hundred fewer from Reiner ...”

“... place were not destitute in the languages, yet it is observ’d of them, they were by this made masters of the English tongue, and more of them excelled in that particular than of any school at that time. Here were produced of ministers, Mr Timothy Cruso, Mr Hannot of Yarmouth, Mr Nathaniel Taylor, Mr Owen and several others; and of another kind, poets ...”

“... Chile, still less the West’s strategic obsession with the Soviet Gulag and the reminiscences of Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Hassan, after all, was one of ours. And although this dark period of Moroccan history is thought to have ended thirty years ago, it’s far from clear that Mohammed VI, the present king, is the new broom he was thought to be when he ...”

“... train Guevara’s Argentine guerrilla group of 1963-4; and Trotsky’s assassin, Ramón Mercader. Alexander Alexiev, the first Soviet Ambassador to Havana, was also a veteran of the Spanish war. Exiled Spanish Republicans and their families were to spread out over the whole of Latin America, stiffening the sinews of the local Left with fresh recruits whose ...”

“... have been good at English. You must have been a star at essays.Well, not quite a star. But the masters thought I was pretty good and so I came to see myself in this role. You know – take a look at my sensibility which is surely superior to yours. By all means clatter off to your games, you muddy fools. In truth, of course, I envied them because that was ...”

“... brown brogue boots. He was 47 but looked about 29. There was something studied about him – the Alexander McQueen scarf, the lawyerly punctilio – and I’d never met anyone who spoke so easily about such large sums of money. When I asked him the point of the whole exercise he said it was simple: ‘Buy in, sell out, make some zeroes.’ MacGregor ...”