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“... justice (who isn’t?). He is also, on some accounts, a victim: his unfortunate mentor at the LSE, David Held, has described the predicament the ostensibly reform-minded Saif found himself in after his father’s people had revolted as ‘the stuff of Shakespeare’, but that surely is letting everyone concerned off far too lightly. He may just be a ...”

“... for drawings and paintings – and commissioned photographs. Some of the most powerful were by David King. He used to come blazing into the office with his huge black-and-white portraits, already measured up for size: no question, ever, of anything being cropped. One was of the writer Francis Wyndham, then in his sixties, in conversation with a 34-year-old ...”

“... David Peterley’s Peterley Harvest was first published on 24 October 1960. The book had a curious history and, shortly before publication, stories began to appear in the press declaring it to be an elaborate hoax. The jacket of the book contained the information that David Peterley was the only son of an old Quaker family that had ‘lived in the Chilterns and been neighbours of Milton and the Penns ...”

“... condition into an intolerable but solvable problem, as the Industrial Revolution has held out, for the first time, the prospect of a more abundant life, not only for the élite, but for humanity as a whole. Only when its eradication became possible did poverty become a problem. We may not have gone far towards solving it in practice (vide ...”

“... by a 51-week jail term. In 1818 an all-party committee in the Tory-dominated House of Commons held that the creation of a permanent police force was unacceptable: ‘Among a free people the very proposal would be rejected with abhorrence.’ Robert Peel ignored this advice and set up the Metropolitan Police in 1829. In 1833, a meeting was called at ...”

“... and never notice a thing, except now and then a maid will laugh and her laughter is caught and held like a tethered bird. [ … ] There came a day when I was feeling better. I asked the serving girls to put my make-up on for me, which they did, then brought me a mirror. My face was green, my lips black. ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘thank you, it makes all ...”

“... is death in abeyance         as blood slows and you         are held in that pale light         frost-fall and a caught breath.         There is no true healing         not at the well of sorrows         not at the whipping-post not         at the communion rail –         Christ’s ...”

“... framing sea and sky, blue climbing on blue, a glaze shaken by the heat, as she drifted in and held heavy in the thickening air. It was this: a man writing, herself as witness, the swarm now stalled and gorged. When I die, bury me in honey. Fill an amphora three times my height, five times my bulk, then let me down into it gently, a long soft glide … His ...”

“... us his job, as foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, is the best in the world – but Held et al. have done the reading, the cross-referencing and the pondering. Friedman goes wrong in the way that good, attention-grabbing journalists often go wrong when they set out to write at length. He tends to fall back on the belief that the world he is ...”

“... gap of a hundred years, the Olympic Games will return to Paris for a third time.The first Olympics held in Paris, in 1900, were a farce. Coubertin had intended them to serve as the sporting component of the Exposition Universelle. Its chief organiser, Alfred Picard, was less keen, dismissing Coubertin’s games for a few hundred amateur male athletes as ...”

“... Hollywood when Ovitz was perceived as the awesome future already arrived: the incarnation of long-held fears concerning what talent agents might become. But it’s clear now that he was also the last of a dying breed (so many American movie pathfinders end up that way). That’s the reason for his book’s tight-lipped title. The man who was recognised, not ...”

“... return to Westminster with a raft of new MPs we face the possibility of the balance of power being held by a party that rejects Britain’s current constitutional settlement. The last time the SNP had sufficient representation in the Commons to make or break a government they used it to break one, calling the no confidence vote in the Callaghan administration ...”

“... produced ‘something of a personal crisis’ and tore away ‘every illusion’ he had ‘ever held about the Jewish state’. And for Robert Fisk, who no longer had illusions about that or anything else, it was a year in which he escaped death a score of times and lived to produce some of the most memorable journalism of the decade. Sharon’s book is a ...”

“... skilfully handling diplomatic problems with the support of the Foreign Office, but it was widely held that in politics he was a bit of a lightweight, a ‘natural number two’ who should never have become prime minister. John Grigg wrote of him before the Suez crisis: ‘Popularity means much more to him than it ever should mean to a statesman. Since the ...”

“... to be gaining a presence not just in politics but in pop culture too. That same month, May 1976, David Bowie was photographed at Victoria Station on his return to Britain after two years in North America. Standing in an open-topped Mercedes, he appeared to give his fans some kind of open-handed, straight-armed – possibly fascist – salute. Soon afterwards ...”