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“... The title of David Abulafia’s magisterial book comes, as he reminds us, from a Hebrew blessing, to be recited when setting eyes on the Mediterranean: ‘Blessed are you, Lord our God, king of the Universe, who made the Great Sea.’ His book is a two-fold history: first of the trade and the traders who discovered the sea, created its ports and never ceased thereafter to animate it in pursuit of commerce ...”

“... the Party, the crisis within ruling circles in the Eighties, perestroika. On all these subjects, David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb is the more acute and penetrating guide. Kapuściński spends no time in dissidents’ apartments, or at the crowded press conferences in Moscow’s international press centre; high politics bores him. He has slipped away from the ...”

“... Trilogy, an elaborate anti-detective volume full of Hawthorne, Melville and Thoreau. Despite its grand title it had been rejected 17 times before a publisher brought it out in 1985; yet it became, at the chic end of the market, a ‘best seller’, and established Auster as a figure to be puffed or sniped at, as some blankly indulgent and huffily impatient ...”

“... and monogamy’. Strange they haven’t found the gene for smugness yet. Not to be outdone is David Buss, author of The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating and Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, whose new book, The Dangerous Passion, is about jealousy, and why it’s ‘as necessary as love or sex’. His acknowledgments ...”

“... Laden hasn’t needed to do anything much lately, because the US government has been doing such a grand job on his behalf, not least by spending billions of dollars breeding killer bugs in laboratories all over the US, ripe for the stealing should bin Laden ever feel moved to launch a biological attack on the Great Satan. In Breeding Bio Insecurity: How US ...”

“... and from the arid plains of Afghanistan it raised a dust-cloud hundreds of feet high: it was a grand Imperial pageant intended to quell the Afghans by appearance alone. It worked. With a readiness which puzzled even the unreflective Auckland, Dost Mohammed left Kabul before the British arrived, and gave himself up to the Amir of Bokhara (who promptly ...”

“... lines on it which Holbein would surely have been delighted to show. The painting would seem a very grand but not unusual portrait of two smart young men of learned and artistic inclinations, were it not for three surprising items. At the front, looking like a guided missile about to hit the floor from somewhere off-right, is a grinning skull in very elongated ...”

“... a disparate band including Paddy Ashdown, Ralf Dahrendorf, Raymond Plant and Julian le Grand have suggested that the state should be the guarantor of social-citizenship rights rather than the provider of services, in the old Beveridgean way. Charter 88 sees the root of our political ills in a culture of ‘subjecthood not citizenship’ and the ...”

“... and Wise into the national mind; they were particularly noticeable in the way they subjected grand international reputations to their own provincial inanity. Rudolf Nureyev was told that he was getting his big chance on the show because Lionel Blair was indisposed; Yehudi Menuhin was told to turn up with his banjo; Alec Guinness was mistaken for ‘Mr ...”

“... of its buildings, are beautifully displayed. Predictably and appropriately, the high spots in this grand tour are the detailed history of the houses in Grosvenor Square, the story of the life and death of Old Grosvenor House and its subsequent rebirth, and the account of the 19th-century grandeur, and 20th-century transformation, of Park Lane. The delicious ...”

“... most of his readers will take to be basic human rights. We have only to look at Michelangelo’s David, carved for the revived Florentine Republic in 1504, to know what it felt like to be rid of the Medici, and to appreciate the civic spirit their dynasty had subdued with its sinister charm. Florentine civic spirit, like that of ancient Athens, was largely ...”

“... intervention. ‘The miracle happened in that film emulsion. Who knows why?’ Writing in 1975, David Thomson compared Garbo to Christ – there were times in their lives when all they wanted was to be left alone – before concluding with a reiteration of the same ‘mysterious truth’: ‘She was photographed. She was all in the silver.’ Whether Garbo ...”

“... Israel and Palestine, and to reform healthcare with a national plan – his pattern has been the grand exordium delivered at stage centre, followed by months of silence. He has left his agents or his advisers or his party or both parties to mind the details. During the protracted delay, the very features that give the impress of his intention are sanded ...”

“... dean said of women: ‘Inferior to us God made you, and inferior to the end you will remain.’ David Sox does not try to disguise the ugliness of his subject’s attitude towards women, nor does he shy away from highlighting other faults. Ned was arrogant, possessive, gullible and hopelessly unrealistic. But his devotion to art makes his story worth ...”

“... Byatt (The Virgin in the Garden) found a slightly earlier epicentre in the Coronation year, 1953. David Lodge’s new novel (How far can you go?) charts Catholic perplexity in the face of the permissive Sixties, Humanae Vitae and the abolition of National Service. Julian Barnes’s very much à la mode Metroland is divided into three sections: I Metroland ...”