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“... the coach had led him to open up with me, with such awkward results. Like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, I believe that there are certain statements and positions you just can’t agree with. Unlike them, though, I have a pathological inability to take extreme opinions or actions, including religious ones, at face value. I don’t only mean ...”

“... a writer. A guest list for a Features party planned in 1951 included Henry Reed, Lawrence Durrell. Christopher Fry, C. Day Lewis, Lennox Berkeley, Michael Tippett, William Walton, Laurie Lee and Stevie Smith. Until the early Fifties the BBC appeared to get a good return from its policy of patronising highbrow talent. From the inauguration of the Italia Prize ...”

“... be religious in the census sense’, nevertheless we Must think ourselves alive and newly-landed, Star-faced Linneans hearing musical Communiqués no erudition robs Of freshness – we must pace our footfall on The temple steps and listen for the sun. Porter’s figuring of possible worlds for himself makes his work restless, exploratory and sometimes ...”

“... against Jews – were the work of ordinary soldiers and police auxiliaries: ‘ordinary men’, as Christopher Browning called them in his 1992 study of one battalion of the Ordnungspolizei. Some military commanders opposed the use of their troops for these purposes, but as Christian Streit and others have shown, the Army was deeply implicated in the war ...”

“... summed up with legendary imbecility in the libel case brought by Jeffrey Archer against the Daily Star, Peter told me, earnestly but with his eyes twinkling, that his Thorpe satire had now become a standard judicial text which judges could only ignore ‘on pain of instant execution’. Like many comic geniuses, Peter succumbed to the high life provided by ...”

“... is a send-up. There’s an infuriating frivolity, cynicism and finally a vacuousness.’ Christopher Booker: ‘Peter Cook once said, back in the 1960s, “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea,” and I think we really are doing that now.’The key word here is ‘giggling’ (or in some versions of the ...”

“... her ‘verdicts’ comes partly from experience: she was already in her forties when she became a star writer, with years of journalistic grunt-work – not to mention life – behind her. But also it is just pragmatic. She has no patience with Janet Malcolm and her pronouncement about every journalist knowing that what ‘he’ does is ‘morally ...”

“... deep-down unreason which so often underlies, and possibly fuels, the ratiocinative dazzle of the star dons, but wonderfully entertaining in the texture of its prose. What makes Carey the most rewarding of the nutty professors is that he writes so well. He has wit, for example, where Professor Ricks can only pun. Yet not even Professor Carey can do without a ...”

“... unHomeric orchestration which leaves out the reference to the Greeks’ low morale. In Kings, Christopher Logue’s rewriting of Books One and Two (a kind of sequel to his War Music, 1981, a version of Books Sixteen to Nineteen), the line is rendered: ‘And as it is with soldiers, / Sad as we were a laugh or two went up.’ Two changes stand out, which ...”

“... the masses what the masses need.In their attempt to understand today’s post-democratic politics, Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti note overlooked commonalities between technocracy and populism which, they argue, allow for an unlikely synthesis between the two. Both involve the replacement of an old elite, one that is seen as technically ...”

“... On 18 May 1593 a warrant was issued to ‘apprehend’ Christopher Marlowe, and on 20 May he was brought before the Privy Council for questioning. He was not detained, but was ordered to report to the Council daily until ‘licensed to the contrary’. This state of precarious liberty lasted only until 30 May, when he was fatally stabbed by a man named Ingram Frizer, though whether his sudden death was a matter of coincidence or conspiracy remains unresolved ...”

“... ever passed to the defence. The DPP’s letter denying the Mooneys had been found was signed by Mr Christopher Bourke, then a senior officer in the DPP’s office. It was drafted by the man in charge of the Ward case at the DPP’s office, Mr Michael Bibby. Bibby later told the Court of Appeal he had discussed the letter with the police before he sent it, but ...”

“... public scrutiny. We have been here before. Think of the disputes that followed the publication of Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men (1992), a study of the behaviour of a German reserve police battalion deployed in Poland in 1942, and the aggressive response to that book by Daniel Goldhagen in Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996). Do people not given to ...”

“... with Mao. The scratchy alliance with the Allied powers provided a wonderful stage for China’s star figure of the Second World War. The daughter of a rich Shanghai businessman, mysterious yet fluent enough in Western culture, Soong Meiling was perfectly cast for the role of alluring Eastern Dragon Lady. At the Cairo summit, Alan Brooke wrote in his diary ...”

“... after the 1994 restitution of Aristide. In November that year, the then secretary of state, Warren Christopher, relayed to the US ambassador intelligence reports that the Red Star Organisation, under Avril’s leadership, was planning a ‘harassment and assassination campaign directed at . . . Aristide supporters’. This ...”