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“... The last thing that dreams should do is come true. It would end in futile tears if they did, much as it would for the autophagist who chomps away at himself from the legs up until he comes to his head and realises that he can never achieve the final consummation. Dreams are for dreaming about. The Hollywood dream-masters got it right when they had Judy Garland playing a star-struck teenager gazing at a pin-up of Clark Gable and singing ‘If you were the only boy in the world ...”

“... sanctuary in music. Surgeons took pride in aprons so dirty they could have stood up on their own; Robert Liston, who pioneered the use of anaesthesia, stored his instruments up his sleeve between surgeries to keep them warm. The mortality rate among medical students – who were liable to let the knife slip – was high: the surgeon John Abernethy concluded ...”

“... court judges to stop the vote counting in Pennsylvania and elsewhere – a stratagem condoned by Lindsey Graham, the chair of the Senate judiciary committee – there are indications of a more deep-seated motive. As far back as the late 1970s, Republicans have presumed the illegitimacy of a Democrat in the White House.Attention, these past few months, to ...”

“... insists that he and his colleagues ‘always did love … a cinema that is haunted by writing’. Robert Bresson said much the same thing: ‘Cinema is not a spectacle. It’s a kind of writing.’ There is a wonderful, casual-seeming evocation of this thought in Daney’s essay from 1969 on Pasolini’s Teorema. He says we know what the desert at the end of ...”

“... that the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, a lifelong Republican who is overseeing the Robert Mueller investigation, is resigning or has been fired. (It had been revealed that in May 2017, only two weeks after his appointment and only a few months after Trump’s inauguration, Rosenstein had discussed wearing a wire to record his conversations with ...”

“... got there ready to flex our muscles,’ Sandoval says, ‘and nothing happened.’ Sergeant Oral Lindsey agrees: ‘we were supposed to be out there blowing stuff up, not stopping traffic, trying to interpret the Iraqi language – it just wasn’t what we were trained to do.’ Throwing rocks at the detainees was one way to relieve the boredom. Another was ...”

“... an important role, both then and now. Present-day ones, like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and Hal Lindsey, accept a Jewish state as a necessary pre-condition for the rebuilding of the Temple, to be followed by the return of Jesus and the conversion of the Jews. Spinoza, however, played hardly any role in the development of such thought. The current attempt in ...”

“... someone in the Pentagon did: waiting would diminish the political impact. Not everyone agreed. Robert Gates, the secretary of defence, was the most outspoken of those who insisted that the agreements with Pakistan had to be honoured. In his memoir, Duty, Gates did not mask his anger: Before we broke up and the president headed upstairs to tell the ...”