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“... it lawyers alone who sustain the cult. In his Bancroft Prize-winning book, Arming America (2000), Michael Bellesiles, a historian at Emory University in Georgia, dared to challenge the view that the widespread possession of firearms in the mid-18th century had underpinned the success of the movement for independence, and found members of the National Rifle ...”

“... W.G. Sebald (say), whereas really it is Vertigo, a version of Sebald’s Schwindel. Gefühle. by Michael Hulse. In the Belfast poems, the movement of words from one place or voice to another is a focus of attention. Carson encourages us to see that the slightest transposition matters. When he writes, ‘Spokesman for censored political party spoke in someone ...”

“... intricate, delicate, perfect, breakable – ‘I lay them out in nice sentences, all my clean, white bones.’ They are what is inside things; what props them up. The Gathering moves between now and the past, through Veronica’s experiences in the present day and her imaginings and foragings in her family’s history. In the present, she must go to the ...”

“... can recite the rosary of disused stations that used to be stops, and that now rewind in a blur of white lettering on blue enamel when we slice obliviously through them. Seeing Libramont take its place on a rail map that took in Sarajevo, Venice, Veliko Tarnovo, Cologne and Dubrovnik made me feel giddy, excited and not entirely comfortable. The world was a big ...”

“... Washington rival) George Croghan into Ohio Country with a pack train of goods, including enough white linen shirts to clothe half the male Indian population, in an attempt to start realising its vision of imperial-Native co-prosperity, it was attacked in 1765 by a gang of American settlers (‘the Black Boys’) dressed up as Indians with charcoaled ...”

“... danger, from which they were saved only by his death seven years later. Our author and his son Michael were born in the safety of South Africa and England only because the rabbi’s untimely demise left a penniless widow and nine children with no means of support and no choice but to emigrate. Of course, Heshel could not have known what was coming, and ...”

“... best forgotten; now their memory must be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats. 19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it as a child at a cinema in Guildford. Then its ...”

“... probably something a bit ridiculous in these privileged laments – oh, sing ’dem Harvard blues, white boy! But I am trying to describe some kind of loss, some kind of falling away. (The gain is obvious enough and thus less interesting to analyse.) I asked Christopher Hitchens, long before he was terminally ill, where he would go if he had only a few weeks ...”

“... British state now doomed? No wars against Continental enemies are in prospect; even geography – white cliffs, island fortress – means a lot less than it did. In the absence of any unitary racial or religious self-definition, old loyalties and alignments – Scottishness, Welshness – have emerged from under the ragged counterpane of British ...”

“... bear no trace of explosives. A second suitcase, opened by a Scottish farmer, contained packets of white powder which a local police officer told him was undoubtedly heroin; no heroin was ever recorded as having been discovered. All but two of the labels that Dr Fieldhouse attached to the bodies he found were removed and have never been found. Although the ...”

“... live among them, had the definite ring of an oxymoron. The vitality of Ackroyd (as of his friend Michael Moorcock) is on a 19th-century scale. He has made respectable the concept of the man of letters. And, much more than that, he has made it pay. Ackroyd also customised his own biography. We know what we are allowed to know and what we can learn, by ...”

“... The way to match the Trump pace is by tweeting; but that is to play his game – a gambit the White House press corps have found irresistible. Much of the damage to US politics over the last two years has been done by the anti-Trump media themselves, with their mood of perpetual panic and their lack of imagination. But the uncanny gift of Trump is an ...”

“... the Olympic charter. Barcelona’s triumph was not its new pedestrian squares, but the presence of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and the rest of the US basketball ‘dream team’.What was Olympism without amateurism? Samaranch attempted to fill the ideological void by bringing the IOC into line with the emerging concerns of international politics in the ...”

“... McCluskie remains in prison. It is customary to think of long sentences and long stretches as Michael Howard’s contribution to British penal policy, but he is merely the latest in a long, if occasionally interrupted, line of social conservatives with a particular interest in correction. When, in October 1993, he announced to the Conservative Party ...”

“... authorities than the force commander in Mogadishu – they came from Centcom HQ in Florida and the White House itself. The charge sheet for any inquiry into Mogadishu war crimes might contain the names of some very high-ranking American individuals. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is roundly in favour of an International Criminal Court. But ...”