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“... a gambler. A professional gambler until his death at 27. Poker. High-low was his action. He was a major leaguer in that line and regrettably there’s a formidable attrition rate as regards high stakes and its lifestyle equivalent. But it was high stakes from the start with my brother: 48 or 72-hour marathons with thousands of dollars changing hands; all ...”

“... Berlin’s most memorable essays deal with writers like Sorel or Tolstoy, rather than with the major political philosophers of the modern period. The sympathy they reveal for the informal and undoctrinal is one of the attractive features of his work – but it has its costs. Where there are elements in a particular corpus of ideas which for one reason or ...”

“... dimly lit pre-takeoff mode. Travelling on a south-eastern trajectory, through halts symbolising major culture shifts – Canary Wharf, Custom House, Woolwich – we time-travelled through remembered eras of colonisation, industry and investment. We were unravelling the Knowles thesis, the assertion that money moved in from the East, like the foul winds of ...”

“... During the same period, Armstrong recorded 235 numbers for Decca, the most commercial of the major labels. Decca never ran out of ideas, many of them poor, for variously teaming their contracted artists – e.g., Armstrong’s ludicrous 1936-37 recordings with two clunky Hawaiian groups, The Polynesians and Andy Iona and His Islanders, part of a ...”

“... precedence. To undertake a new full-scale biography of William Shakespeare, then, or to suggest a major alteration to our understanding of the playwright’s early life, is to walk directly onto holy ground: in setting out to produce Shakespeare: A Life and Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’, Park Honan and E.A.J. Honigmann have taken on tasks which are about ...”

“... to Moscow by monarchs and ministers from the Gulf states. He had revived Russia’s image as a major rival to the United States in the management of global affairs. He had even succeeded in sidelining two years of tension over Ukraine and raised the possibility of an end to sanctions against Russia. Such is the demonisation of Putin by Western governments ...”

“... otherwise incomprehensible indifference to current events is seen by him in 2007 as possessing one major virtue: ‘When I began to travel I saw places fresh.’ But has he seen ‘places fresh’, as he claims? Or is he no more than a prisoner of his history and heritage? It is a question worth asking. Many people have strong opinions about this Trinidadian ...”

“... it. Despite his English sympathies, Dunbar’s poetry did not travel well across the border. Major works by his near contemporaries Robert Henryson and Gavin Douglas were printed in England during the 16th century, but none of his own. Nor up to now has there been any evidence that manuscript versions of his poems circulated in England. This makes even ...”

“... United States, the envy of his coevals of whatever colour, gender or -ism. Gates is the author of major works of cultural-literary-linguistic exegesis, The Signifying Monkey and Figures in Black, as well as miscellaneous essays and reviews, some of them collected in the recent Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars, a handbook of multiculturalism written ...”

“... German rail communications. After nine months in the mountains, while still only a 28-year-old major, he was sent to Belgrade as Head of the American Mission to Tito. He ended the war as political adviser to General John Harding (of whose XIII Corps in Venezia Giulia pars minor fui), trying to stop young idiots like ...”

“... carried on, with his awful quasi-American evangelical rallies, as though people couldn’t think. John Hewson, whose like I trust we shall never see again in this arena, was brought up a Baptist – he’s still got that pious look – and studied postgraduate economics in the USA. Later he left the wife who’d typed his thesis and raised the kids, telling ...”

“... But is it any more startling than to find Aneurin Bevan willing (as I have just learned from John Campbell’s Nye Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism) to see force used in 1948 against dockers seeking to defy Cripps’s wage freeze? Even the most right-wing employer cannot risk industrial relations being made unworkable. Even the most left-wing ...”

“... of Global 2000. They maintain that the problems are regional and national rather than world-wide. John Wise considers that fish resources are at least keeping pace with world population increase and that, in spite of pollution, aquaculture and fish farming in general do not seem to be suffering in any major way. It is ...”

“... at once so near and so far from the prosperous centre of pre-war English society. One of the major planks of Sailer’s Bermondsey socialism was pacifism and it was his doomed opposition to the war which led to the collapse of his socialist dream and to the installation after the war of the altogether different Labour regime personified by Bob ...”

“... to doubts or to be put off by setbacks, Ron Smith showed as many sterling qualities as Burton, St John Philby or Thesiger. The extent to which the story is true, however, is another question. There are aspects of Foot’s narrative, from suspiciously un-Arab names (Major Absalom) and geographical howlers (‘Red Sea oil ...”