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“... was endorsed by most of George W. Bush’s national security team, including Michael Hayden, James Clapper, Robert Blackwill and Richard Haass – a who’s who of the foreign policy establishment. This has led to some barrel-scraping on the part of the Republicans. For director of the CIA, Trump has chosen John Ratcliffe, his final director of national ...”

“... to mar. If there was a friendship that Giacometti formed in London at that time, it was with Robin Campbell of the Arts Council, a new acquaintance to whom he was manifestly drawn in a very personal way. He and Bacon liked each other well enough, but they only met a few times and only once alone. One factor in bringing them together was Isabel Rawsthorne, who ...”

“... traffic, occasionally lost, and at the end of ‘Fastest on Earth’ she gets a parking fine in St James’s Square. Many of the pleasures are urban and precisely located in the area around Macaulay’s Bloomsbury flat off Chancery Lane, but there are rural pleasures too. In ‘Easter in the Woods’ she contemplates a finely detailed landscape as she lingers ...”

“... than in Constantinople.’ The claim went to the heart of the republican theory of liberty, and James Harrington quickly picked up on it: ‘To say that a Lucchese hath no more liberty or immunity from the laws of Lucca than a Turk hath from those of Constantinople, and to say that a Lucchese hath no more liberty or immunity by the laws of Lucca than a Turk ...”

“... a modernist art of estrangement. But the revival has not lasted. When Garner won a Windham-Campbell Prize in 2016, James Wood offered a glowing appraisal of her work in the New Yorker, but ignored The Children’s Bach and mentioned Monkey Grip only fleetingly. Instead Wood focused on what he called Garner’s ...”

“... Smith sticks close to the source material, though she sets the play in a real pub, the Colin Campbell, and divides the lines from Alysoun’s speech between different characters. Here the Wife is Alvita, a Jamaican-born woman in her late fifties – as one friend puts it, ‘she’s been that bitch since 1963.’ In a nod to Chaucer’s General ...”

“... and secure an appointment with the most in-demand eye surgeon. His OBE party is organised by Naomi Campbell. ‘Naomi had booked a suite at Claridge’s to throw a lunch for my family. It was a Sunday roast but, Naomi-style, there was also jerk chicken and rice and peas, not usually on the Claridge’s menu, but, of course, Naomi can get anyone to do ...”

“... John Bulkeley; the carpenter, John Cummins; and three young midshipmen, John Byron, Alexander Campbell and Isaac Morris. They returned home in rival groups, by different routes, telling conflicting stories of exactly what had happened in the months following the shipwreck – accusing one another of mutiny, murder and betrayal.By the mid 18th ...”

“... book on the KGB and fairly early in Harlot’s Ghost its eponymous figure, ‘Harlot’, a James Angleton composite, says of the Agency that ‘our real duty is to become the mind of America.’ How else to link the Mafia, Marilyn Monroe, the media, the Congress, Hollywood and all the other regions of CIA penetration? ‘The mind of America’. A ...”

“... kept us all ablaze these last few weeks and months. Bella Caledonia, Wee Ginger Dug, Rev. Stuart Campbell, Alec Finlay, Wheelie Bins for Yes – a cataract of stuff. God knows, in my hours online I wandered down some peculiar byways (the Spectator comments pages). The Better Together ‘Patronising Lady’ advert kept us entertained for ages. (Watch the ...”

“... Presidency, Kennedy took at least two large and by now well-known chances: his affairs with Judith Campbell Exner, who was also the girlfriend of the mobster Sam Giancana, and with Ellen Rometsch, who was believed to be an East German spy and had to be spirited out of the country. His recklessness was far greater than Bill Clinton’s (Dallek found that ...”

“... Stumbling​ out of the pouring rain on the Isle of Skye, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson found a welcome in the house of Allan MacDonald at Kingsburgh. Dr Johnson had developed a nasty cold; Boswell was wet and thirsty and delighted to get indoors. ‘There was a comfortable parlour,’ he wrote in his journal in the autumn of 1773, ‘with a good fire, and a dram of admirable Hollands gin went round ...”

“... what remained of its North American possessions: in the 1840s Toronto tripled in size). As James Belich showed in Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World (2009), more British investment went to the Australian colonies in the 1870s and 1880s than anywhere else in the world. In 1835, Melbourne had no permanent ...”

“... People would ring the doorbell to ask about Stevenson, and they still do. John remembers James Pope Hennessy turning up when he was writing his book about RLS. ‘He was busy turning down a knighthood at the time,’ Mr Macfie said. ‘And I think they were keen to give it to him in thanks for all he hadn’t written about Queen Mary.’ Macfie’s ...”

“... bin Laden’s hideout under torture. ‘A racist society can’t but fight a racist war,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1967, ‘the assumptions acted on at home are also acted on abroad.’ During the war on terror the traffic between the US and various shithole countries wasn’t only in assumptions: there was also a wholesale exporting of ...”