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“... Nitze, Kennan’s hawkish successor as director of policy planning, produced a paper that could be read in two minutes. Nitze’s crisp, technocratic belligerence was the future. Kennan, Gaddis writes, ‘had become prophetic but no longer relevant’, at least not to policymaking. Still, he could not resist when Acheson offered him the ambassadorship to the ...”

“... The Family Idiot, and of Beauvoir’s America Day by Day; Lydia Davis, a translator of Proust; or Richard Sieburth, translator of Leiris, Michaux and Nerval. Instead, the publishers chose Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, two Americans who have lived in Paris since the 1960s and worked as English teachers at the Institut d’Etudes ...”

“... and the early years of the 20th century there were several related attempts, by writers such as Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas, to identify ‘England’ with ‘the countryside’ (largely for an urban readership), while the interwar decades tended to throw up more quizzical searches for ‘the real England’, assumed to have been submerged by the ...”

“... income, excluding temporary effects from the downturn. The first point in their economic policy read as follows: ‘We will safeguard Britain’s credit rating with a credible plan to eliminate a large part of the structural deficit over a Parliament.’ How? It’s on the next page: ‘We will cut government spending to bring the deficit down and restore ...”

“... commentators. Amid the clamour for retribution, Zakaria sounded calm and judicious. Read now, however, his article seems notable mostly for its evasions: he was careful not to say anything that might get him stigmatised as a radical. Blaming the Arabs for their failure to modernise, he didn’t mention the American obsession with energy ...”

“... the autumn, Lord Hutton listened with great politeness to a very great deal of evidence, and read even more, on issues that he had already – or soon would – entirely put out of his mind. With its terms of reference construed in this way, the report was bound to be somewhat favourable to government and somewhat critical of the BBC. The authorities ...”

“... neutralists make substantial moral claims. To defend the two-face schema, Gray could say, echoing Richard Rorty, that there’s the bit where neutralists say it, and then there’s the bit where they take it back. ‘It’ here is the neutralists’ claim that they avoid controversial moral ideals. But then they take this claim back, relying on a moral ideal ...”

“... repressive figure of Joachim – though it does help one to understand the shock-waves caused by Richard Strauss, rocking the boat with solecisms, crudities, reckless infringements of instrumental propriety, general vulgarity and callowness, and troubling Tovey the chaste grammarian and self-appointed guardian of the sacred Teutonic flame. (But he doesn’t ...”

“... and advertisements, and trying to master the finances of printing and distribution. At night he read Joseph Conrad and other classic authors, and after midnight spoke for hours on the telephone with his father about politics, history and the stock markets.’ Once he made it to the big leagues via his adventures with Argus, Black began to expand his ...”

“... and disparate assembly of scholars, from Robert Tucker, Ronald Suny and Alexander Rabinowitch to Richard Pipes and Robert Conquest. His reading in secondary sources is broad, and includes s0me Russian and German. It’s a lesser work in every sense than Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, which came out first though it deals with a later period. The Court of ...”

“... despite all this, The Spirit Level does contain a powerful political message. It is impossible to read it and not to be impressed by how often greater equality appears to be the answer, whatever happens to be the question. It provides a connection between what otherwise look like disparate social problems. Wilkinson and Pickett make this point clearly: The ...”

“... pressure from his aides – Trump finally denounced white supremacists as ‘evil’ in a speech read off a teleprompter, he sounded like a little boy forced to eat his spinach, or to rat on his friends. No president has been so easily flattered, so thrilled by the sight of his own name, which his advisers include in policy memos in order to hold his ...”

“... of 1919. Nick Lloyd dismisses these protests as whipped up by ignorant agitators who hadn’t even read the act. I should have thought that the label on the tin would give you a pretty good idea of what was in it. It was against the Rowlatt Act that Gandhi led his first nationwide satyagraha, or ‘soul-force’, in India, after practising this tactic of civil ...”

“... high-spirited comedy, Crampton Hodnet, set among scholars, spinsters and clergy. The agent who read it thought the story and its characters tame. ‘Can you imagine an old spinster,’ Pym wrote to friends, ‘frowning anxiously over her MS, trying to be more wicked?’Pym was 37 and still single when a much-revised version of her roman-à-clef was finally ...”

“... net cast by most postmodernist critics (myself included): Dennis Oppenheim rather than Richard Serra, say, Gretchen Bender rather than Cindy Sherman. Although written by a critic in formation, these early texts anticipate many of his later concerns, especially when it comes to artists focused on perception and technology, from Blake and Turner to ...”