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“... to win a presidential election in an African democracy. There were rumours that President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was not attending the UN meeting because she was busy dealing with the crisis, or because she faced political instability at home. But we knew that one of her staff had fallen ill with Ebola. A few days ago, we heard that another of our Liberian ...”

“... probably because he was aware the boat was overloaded,’ said the Times. It was outrageous of Dr Johnson to say that no man would be a sailor if he had contrivance enough to seek safety in a gaol. What reduced life expectancy in the Navy was the spongy, broken-backed nature of so many of its fighting ships. Since great oaks could not be felled fast enough to ...”

“... have been dealt with explicitly by other writers: Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Grace Nichols and Tom Leonard, to name a few. For some, ‘literary art’ is a territory to be attained (Harrison’s ‘we’ll occupy/ your lousy leasehold, poetry’), in others a rule-book to be torn up (Agard’s ‘mugging de Queen’s ...”

“... We are practically wiped out but we charged and took the Hun trenches yesterday. I stopped a Jack Johnson with my head, and my skull is slightly cracked. But I’m getting on splendidly. I did awfully well. Grenfell died slowly enough from the shell-splinter for his family to rush over and attend. His mother read him poems and Euripides’s Hippolytus, of ...”

“... to launch the first of a series of stamps commemorating American folk heroes (the others are Paul Bunyan, Mighty Casey and Pecos Bill). According to legend, John Henry worked on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, driving steel in the Big Bend Tunnel just outside Talcott. It is here that he bests that earlier ‘new innovation’, the steam drill. John ...”

“... divided but exceptionally feeble. One needn’t be quite as scathing about Neil Kinnock as R.W. Johnson has recently been in these columns in order to agree with him that the idea of Kinnock at No 10 is disturbingly like the idea of Jesse Jackson in the White House. And one needn’t put too much weight on Peter Jenkins’s account of Mrs Thatcher in tears ...”

“... a vertebra, reflecting again at a high angle before exiting just below his Adam’s apple,’ Paul Chambers writes in Head Shot: The Science behind the JFK Assassination, published in 2010 and now appearing in an expanded edition. Chambers, a shock physicist, has worked for Nasa (optics branch), the Naval Surface Warfare Center (energetic materials and ...”

“... or it can make pseudo-epic. Does J.G. Farrell take the Celtic line in The Siege of Krishnapur, and Paul Scott follow a more plodding and literal Anglo-Saxon formula in the four-novel sequence of The Raj Quartet?There might be something in that. I suspect, for one thing, that those who cannot read Tolkien find Paul Scott ...”

“... you see, far off, the secondary Downtown of the Galleria area, and the glinting monolith of Philip Johnson’s Transco Tower. Johnson is perhaps the most conspicuous architect in the Houston cityscape. He was brought in by the Menils, the city’s great artistic benefactors, and his later career is interestingly represented ...”

“... labelled himself. But he could have escaped the legend to which he had devoted such energies. As Paul Ferris’s excellent biography established some time back, while Thomas was certainly in a bad way, his death was down to a medical blunder. He wasn’t martyred by the barbarians of the Inland Revenue: by the time he died Thomas was on the verge of being ...”

“... Down was originally written for a branch of the OSS, the Foreign Information Service, and is (as Paul Fussell notes in Writing in Wartime) ‘virtually indistinguishable from the emissions of the Office of War Information’. Bombs Away was written for the Army Air Corps. In the scoundrel time, after the war, Steinbeck went along with the inquisitions of the ...”

“... that academics started taking an interest in the history of blacks in Britain. In the Sixties, Paul Edwards, originally a specialist in Old Icelandic, produced editions of the two most important African-British writers of the 18th century, Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano. In the Seventies, the Black Power movement’s insistence on the need for black ...”

“... it’s Larkin who comes out of it as the better performer. Like other figures on the right, Paul Johnson, Michael Wharton and the Spectator crowd, Larkin regarded television as the work of the devil, or at any rate the Labour Party, and was as reluctant to be pictured as any primitive tribesman. Silly, I suppose I think this is, and also ...”

“... of the ‘lives of the poets’, a title that has little to do with Grub Street or Samuel Johnson. The favoured means of escape for Jonathan’s colleagues consists in finding an even more constricting straitjacket, a solitary cell that women cannot enter. We hear of a writer burying himself in a sub-basement padlocked from the inside, and of another ...”

“... desart yet unclaim’d by Spain? The answer to the question posed in these lines quoted by Paul Mapp in The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire turned out to be a resounding yes. In 1738, when Dr Johnson wrote his poem, some two-thirds of North America was still terra incognita, as far as Europeans were ...”