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“... got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.’ When Stalin mounted the Berlin Blockade in 1948, Washington dithered but Bevin was adamant: the US must send B-29s to Europe immediately. This dramatically raised the potential cost of Soviet misbehaviour: the B-29 had the range to fly to ...”

“... as Mullin is reminded by the astoundingly mercenary Cherie Booth after leaving office. The price of accepting is to swell the payroll vote, and spout stultifying drivel. In 1999, Blair calls to offer Mullin a post as a bottom-ranking minister. First he accepts. Next day he resigns. Blair gets back on the phone. He dangles the prospect of promotion to ...”

“... Lancaster, Audie Murphy, Burgess Meredith, Groucho Marx, Vincente Minnelli, Gregory Peck, Vincent Price, Robert Ryan, Edward G. Robinson, Donna Reed, Nicholas Ray, Robert Siodmak, Frank Sinatra, Sylvia Sidney, Claire Trevor, Franchot Tone, Walter Wanger, Keenan Wynn, William Wyler, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Jerry Wald and Robert Young. Ronald Reagan, a New ...”

“... discoveries on the island of Kos; Dietrich, more ‘pirate’ than professor, a perma-tanned jack of all intellectual trades replete with duelling scars, and an enthusiastic Nazi to boot. The parents separated soon after the war, and it’s pretty clear whose side the son is on: Dietrich and his contemporaries were a ‘waste’, he says, a generation ...”

“... an icefield so it could set a transatlantic record that would push up his company’s share price, allowing him and his friends on the boat to profit by selling the shares. The hero is the German first officer, Petersen, who resists Ismay and then works selflessly to save the passengers, jumping into the icy water with a baby in his arms after failing ...”

“... and never gives up the hope of reform, but nowhere does he write as if he agreed with Richard Price, the hero of his father’s generation, about the perfectibility of social man through sheer enlightenment. Rather, he speaks of Price and Joseph Fawcett and others with a tender veneration, as great and good men, perhaps ...”

“... just a dead pan. I don’t know whether it helps to remember that his favourite comedian was Jack Benny. Mann was born in Lübeck in 1875, into a well-off merchant family. His father died when he was 16, the business was liquidated and the children were left with substantial independent means, which Thomas later enhanced though his marriage to the ...”

“... read the inscription Kipling composed for it: This for a charge to our children in sign of the price we paid The price we paid for freedom that comes unsoiled to your hand Read revere and uncover for here are the victors laid They that died for the city being sons of the land These chiselled, unpunctuated words made a ...”

“... with Sinatra was a serious three-line whip: beg off early, fall asleep, order a coffee instead of Jack Daniels, and you risked expulsion, exile, the Antarctica of his disaffection. He could not abide the ends of days: it was one thing he had no control over. So he made an enemy of the clock, of merely human time, each night’s feeble apocalypse: that dire ...”

“... English cuppa just to watch it die. The ad was illustrated by a picture of a teacup with a union jack-tagged teabag nestled in a bouquet of patriotic souvenirs – a red double-decker bus, an old-fashioned black cab, an old-fashioned red phone box, a Big Ben. Threatening this pot-pourri of Englishness was a clenched fist, blue like the European ...”

“... others; it is even the foundation of the principal branches.’ But the new improvements came at a price and they changed for ever the relationship between the land and the people who tried to live by it. British peasant life was effectively over. ‘The agrarian revolution was economically justifiable,’ Pauline Gregg writes in A Social and Economic History ...”

“... the huge education project of that century’s Enlightenment. The huge project was not without its price. The best of these new studies, Ann Jessie Van Sant’s Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context, acutely defines the cost of the concepts of sensibility and the sentimental. Van Sant attends to the importance of ...”

“... verbal structure and are no more important as beings than are the animates in ‘The house that Jack built’. In other stories there are characters with such names as Prism, Grippe, and Poche, who are put on elaborate display, but who are really no more than figures in a comedy of humours. Ms Gallant does not seem to rub elbows with her Parisians, as Joyce ...”

“... keep we her? – The Grecians keep our aunt. Is she worth keeping? – Why, she is a pearl Whose price hath launch’d above a thousand ships, and it is perfectly clear that ‘her’ and ‘she’ refer to Helen throughout. If Kenneth Palmer had retained the Folio colon after ‘aunt’, it would be necessary to explain in a note that the first ...”

“... thing that is not, quite. Getting some things wrong (or only essentially right) was probably the price he paid for getting some hugely important things right – the nature of totalitarianism, for instance. The struggle to get that vision of evil across, to give it very sharp definition, may be what led him to dogmatic excess or distortion in lesser ...”