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“... expected them to do; they did what the government expressly wanted them to do – even though it may well be that the government was quite ignorant of the long-term consequences of the policies which it forced on the business community and on the productive industry of Britain.’ A long and valuable section seems to confirm all we have always secretly ...”

“... of the lazy sod, the sod beneath the skin. Delaying isn’t an activity, with hidden meanings that may be of interest: here, it’s a gap in nature, or a sign of complete inactivity. This seems an increasingly unattractive line to take, usually emanating from people unable to grasp that some kinds of ‘work’ are pathological, and that a life that cannot ...”

“... taken by historical research are indicative of a nation’s broader preoccupations, then we may have to prepare ourselves for a religious revival of some magnitude. Religious explanations in history are all the rage – nowhere more so than in the study of the English Civil Wars. John Morrill, that panjandrum of Civil War revisionism, is reported to ...”

“... the grieving mother’s kidnapping, the Peacocks adopted the abducted little girl, who was renamed May and absorbed into the Peacock family, half sister, half servant? Johnson keeps a careful eye on May in the background of Mary Ellen’s more thrilling story. Spoiled, pretty, intelligent Mary Ellen complains about her ...”

“... to act without full or explicit orders and been praised for not ‘going by the book’. This may have allowed field commanders ‘to be creative’, but it also distorted the relationship between the army and the political leadership of the state. The example of the Golan Heights, occupied although Dayan and the government had decided not to do so, is ...”

“... down a few doors, leaning on unusual suspects. John Jasper is an avatar of the patricide painter Richard Dadd. Dadd, by this account, lost his marbles under an Egyptian sun, trying to keep pace with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips. Phillips couldn’t keep still: he drove on remorselessly. As Seabrook sweeps through Egyptology, psychological profiling, snap ...”

“... in Paris. She would borrow Resnais’s apartment, investigate Blanchot for her translator friend Richard Howard, go to see the latest Godard film or visit the catacombs with her son. In the late 1960s, she fell in love with Nicole Stéphane, who had acted in Jean-Pierre Melville’s films but now produced her own. Stéphane, who was descended from the ...”

“... of expression might – only might – cease to be perceived as a menace to national security. As Richard Sakwa’s book suggests, Putin has a choice of two directions. One is simply to ‘reconcentrate state power’. The other is to ‘reconstitute’ that power in a new form by imposing the rule of law. Putin talks a lot about ‘the dictatorship of ...”

“... of themselves when they imagine they are performing for an audience of one. On the strength of Richard Mangan’s edition, we must assume that Gielgud’s contribution to the documenting of theatrical history will be uncertain (‘I had never noticed that Albee had such big ears!’) while his contribution to the understanding of bad character is ...”

“... in public schools, which ordered states to allow women some access to abortion, which directed Richard Nixon to release incriminating tapes, which ordered states to permit same-sex marriage, and which rejected Donald Trump’s last-ditch pleas for a judicial coup d’état. It is also the court which ruled that African Americans, no matter their ...”

“... the cable was a joke of some sort. It might just as well have been an invitation from Cosima and Richard Wagner to come to Bayreuth, or from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to spend an afternoon at the offices of the Dial. It took me about two days to ascertain from various friends in New York and Paris that it was indeed genuine, and far less time than that ...”

“... Party’s deputy chairman. Then the second disaster: he offers £2000 to a prostitute so that she may go abroad. The deal takes place at Victoria Station, where Archer’s proxy meets the prostitute, who is in league with the News of the World. The story breaks. Archer resigns as deputy chairman, but sues another tabloid, the Daily Star, for libel. The ...”

“... if they were to be prevented, there would be far fewer books. I am not confident that either book may be said to be well-written; that question, too, could be thought to arise. In Search of a Past affects not to be written at all – so much as researched, recorded and compiled. But the editorial method which is applied to the data has much to display that is ...”

“... obscure provisions need deciphering; occasional nonsense needs correcting; perfectly clear texts may be impossible to apply to novel situations. These and other quotidian exercises are the subject of judgments and commentaries which try to bring ordered methods to bear on the translation of a text into an outcome – that is to say, on trying to give a law ...”

“... that the deity tends not to comment directly on current affairs these days, the anxious recruit may have struggled to put this advice into practice. Browsing leaders from the previous couple of decades might have yielded a more concrete sense of what was wanted. It would appear that omniscience is one attribute of the God-like perspective; absence of ...”