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“... for the most part equally addressed. Though the central fictional character of Burr, the narrator, Charles Schuyler, is fairly one-dimensional (his guilt about betraying Burr, for example, is reiterated rather than developed), the novel’s principal historical figures – Burr, Jefferson and Hamilton – are vividly imagined. Burr is the Vidal figure (in the ...”

“... Laurent, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and a book about the love-affair between Joseph Kennedy and Gloria Swanson. He seems always to write about various kinds of star, presumably so as to reveal their secrets to their adoring fans in the usual sensational way, and reap profits. But there is a great deal of sober information in this book, some of ...”

“... actual, three-dimensional temples, housing the sacred relics of Presidential papers: the one for Kennedy in Boston stops short just this side of idolatry; Johnson’s in Texas goes well beyond it. But in England, the old genre has withered. Of recent Cabinet Ministers, only Ernest Bevin (two vols down, one to go) and Nye Bevan (canonised by Michael ...”

“... companion of the Princess Ghika at the Villa Gamberaia up in Settignano. The philosopher, Charles Strong, his college mate, who had married a Rockefeller daughter, showed up.’ It’s like watching the suitcases rotate in an international airport. Miss Blood comes round again a hundred pages and a half a dozen years later, writing to Gertrude Stein ...”

“... was born in June 1948, which makes him the same age as Ian McEwan and a few months older than King Charles. Like McEwan, he spent his earliest years in Tripoli – his father, like McEwan’s, was posted there as a British army officer – and was sent back aged eleven to an England still shaped by the war, for a boarding school education at the hands of ...”

“... we have experienced. And it’s not where we were when we heard about the assassination of Jack Kennedy, but what we were watching: television. Home alone, or straining the neck to look at a wall-mounted set in a half-empty restaurant, we were in thrall to waveringly remote prints of reality. Meanwhile, on the same afternoon, the nominated ...”

“... Party that represented the corrupt, gerrymandering and racist establishment. He viewed the Kennedy election, in which he took a junior’s part, as one more ‘delivery’ of the Georgia vote by the local patronage system. This is a truer account of the origins of ‘Camelot’ than many sentimental retrospectives allow. But now it is the Republican ...”

“... British art schools were in the stained glass department, overseen by a dynamic young teacher, Charles Carey. Boty’s switch of disciplines was, Kristal suggests, ‘the most important choice of her creative life’. Carey was an inspiring teacher and stained glass was having a moment in the avant-garde. Almost the only form of decoration acceptable to ...”

“... of sportive warfare’ – the only other example of it may be the ‘Flyting’ of Dunbar and Kennedy.) It is a very difficult poem: the correct text is often uncertain, and the vocabulary is of the sort that is marked ambiguously ‘obsc.’ in glossaries – or, as one of Montgomerie’s editors puts it, apropos of another piece of invective, ‘it is ...”

“... parties’ with ‘Mrs and mistresses all together in an alcoholic haze’, as the diplomat Charles Thayer recalled. After Roosevelt died, US diplomats had a chance to act on their resentment. The Soviets were hardly innocent bystanders. As the Red Army advanced, its soldiers seemed intent on confirming Western stereotypes of their barbarism. They raped ...”

“... systems and partly in systems of political and military control. Every technological system, as Charles Perrow has observed, has its characteristic ‘normal accident’. The things that Murphy’s Law says will (or can) go wrong depend on the design of technical and human systems that are intended to ensure the weapons work. In the early atomic age, bombs ...”

“... cynicism’, ‘afraid to wake up and live’. She was particularly cross with the national hero Charles Lindbergh. He’d been ‘beloved’ to her when he’d flown solo from New York to Paris; but he’d taken to headlining rallies to defend the Neutrality Act against the ‘British and Jewish races’ who would ‘lead our country to destruction’. He ...”

“... of the New Republic. In ‘The Legend of Colin Powell: Anatomy of an Establishment Career’, Charles Lane examined Powell’s ascent to power during April 1969, when the Army’s official investigation into the My Lai massacre was reluctantly creaking to life. Powell, it turns out, was assigned to Americal Division headquarters at Chu Lai. Charlie ...”

“... foundation for what is going to be a very long struggle’. The struggle has been long already. Charles Glass Jerusalem Because I live ten blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, my response to the events of 11 September is intensely localised; but because I was a thousand miles away in a foreign country when the events occurred, my experience of ...”

“... such marginal representatives of the Civilised Life as Harry S. Truman, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (whose presence was, BB felt, ‘life-enhancing’), and, most improbable of all, Ernest Hemingway. Meryle Secrest discloses that Hemingway was desperate in his suit for Berenson’s favours, and would have prostrated himself for a petal from the Great ...”