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“... Paper: ‘Front-line numbers will be about 55 at 1 April 1983 and 1984.’ At this point enter Mr Keith Speed with an unrepentant and still unsatisfied ‘I told you so’. In May 1981 he was dismissed as Navy Minister (the last, as it turned out) for opposing Mr Nott’s proposed naval reductions at a time of rapidly expanding Soviet naval power and ...”

“... was in 1956 by the separation of powers and the prerogatives of Congress, move with sureness and speed to confront a dictator in the Middle East. He would think that, as he had always predicted, the United States, when faced, to use his words, with ‘what is in fact an act of force which, if it is not resisted, if it is not checked, will lead to ...”

“... for a study he wrote for them. He did not fight the next election in the Conservative colours. Keith Best stood down as Conservative candidate in 1987 when it emerged that he was to be charged with criminal deception arising out of what was alleged to have been a multiple application for British Telecom shares. The ...”

“... professional policy-makers, specialist commentators and academic observers were stunned by the speed and completeness of the Soviet meltdown. It was, for example, disconcerting to find that one’s own arguments about the future of Germany proved in retrospect to have been sincere and honest when one had for so long assumed them to be hypocritical. To hold ...”

“... name in the mid and late Seventies as a strung-out stringer, the suburban boy getting high with Keith Richards, hanging out at backstage drug binges, and – on one memorable occasion – being beaten about the body by Sid Vicious wielding a rusty bicycle chain. Kent’s most fruitful years writing for New Musical Express coincided with the descent into ...”

“... development of techniques and technologies to compensate for our biological inadequacies. As Keith Houston documents, the first number systems were developed around five thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, making it possible for users to write down what memory might struggle to retain. An early innovation was finger-counting, or dactylonomy, which assigns ...”

“... Suez, inevitably, is the big story in a book remarkable for the range of material mastered with speed. Much of the interest will be to see what difference release of these documents has made. The answer is that while it has not greatly changed the outlines of the story as told by Paul Johnson, Hugh Thomas and a succession of memoirists, it begins to make ...”

“... US, the protector of Israel. Saddam’s War and Unholy Babylon have been put together with great speed. John Bulloch and Harvey Morris, the authors of the first book, and Adel Darwish, one of the authors of the second, all write for the Independent, and regular readers of that paper will not find in Saddam’s War much (except for the earlier history, whose ...”

“... A security camera captured the entire event from a distance, and it happened with great speed. The killer fired six rounds, four of them on target, then jumped into a car which pulled up at that moment and whisked him away. That the killing was a highly professional job doesn’t necessarily mean it was ordered by the highest professional. We ...”

“... rooms with carbon monoxide. Food was adulterated, water polluted and infections spread with lethal speed. Thefts and robberies were common in the unlit, winding streets, where temptation abounded – alcohol, gambling and prostitution. Bills of mortality recorded more than two thousand suicides between 1654 and 1735, each with its own now lost tale of ...”

“... of intelligence as a reputation for having one. Like modern believers in the deterrent value of speed cameras, even when they are not switched on, he observed that setting up booths for watching ‘theevish places’ brought an end to robberies, even when the watchmen were absent or asleep: ‘the empty booth is strength & safegard enough.’ Throughout the ...”

“... the possibility of reforming Communism as a political system. Solidarity followed, at breakneck speed, a classic Western pattern of relations with the state (Ascherson makes a perceptive comparison with the Comisiones Obreras in Spain), and it is not surprising, given the chaos of the economy, that it should have failed to find a modus vivendi. This ...”

“... back at their home airfield when the undercarriage gave way on landing. When the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richard talks dismissively about ‘Brabazon bands’ he is alluding to an ill-fated post-war British airliner. A rock band can be beautiful to look at, sound as sleek and smooth as you like, the gnarled Richard is saying, but these days you can’t just ...”

“... authority as essentially the authority of continuing traditions. One question, therefore, which Keith Thomas’s series must confront at the start is simply whether for us as moderns any continuing traditions do (or even could) retain their authority. (An entire school of sociologists, for example, seeks to define modernity as a categorical denial of ...”

“... It attacked small-minded philistinism and sentimentality; it embraced disruption, machines and speed. He was unfazed by Marinetti’s military language and belief in war as ‘the only health-giver in the world’. It was a way of saying that energy and spirit were more important than bourgeois materialism. In any case, Nevinson had, as he said ...”