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“... negotiations with Gorbachev over the reunification of Germany, the US secretary of state, James Baker, floated the idea of a pledge not to expand Nato eastwards. But the question of whether US and European leaders ‘promised’ there would be no eastward expansion is neither here nor there: Moscow was under no illusion about US intentions, and in any case ...”

“... childhood in West London, Merchant Taylors’ School, history and modern languages at St John’s College, Oxford, then an MBA at Insead. In 1997 he and Ian Wace launched the hedge fund Marshall Wace, with $50 million of seed capital raised from friends, family and George Soros. It now manages $69 billion in assets. Like many hedge fund ...”

“... as another form of inter-species conflict. For centuries, Jews had been likened to animals: John Chrysostom had placed them at ‘the level of the lusty goat and the pig’; in the influential 19th-century anti-Semitic novel Biarritz, they were described as having ‘the tenacity of a snake, the cunning of a fox, the look of a falcon, the memory of a ...”

“... full literary-historical context. Last year the Thomas marriage suffered trial by LRB letter-page. John Pikoulis accused Jonathan Barker of editorially fudging his contentions that ‘the breach between [Helen] and Edward was final,’ and that he effectively deserted her for the muse of war. Pikoulis rested his case on an assertion by Lawrance ...”

“... he was also strongly partisan; on occasions, he came close to ‘going native’, in the manner of John Reed with the Red Guards in Petrograd. His journalism always threatened to tip over into a more direct, military involvement – until he finally became, and died, a soldier. A South African born into a liberal, newspaper-owning family in the Eastern ...”

“... a face ‘sun-baked to the hue of coffee’ – and stalwart Dr (of course) Petrie, who, like his Baker Street predecessor, tells the story and gets the girl. Nayland Smith and Petrie exist in a state of wildly malfunctioning cliché: ‘His eyes were literally on fire,’ Petrie solemnly reports of one of Smith’s more agitated moments. Rohmer didn’t ...”

“... as one soon learns from the letters he wrote to his son Pierre in the 1930s and 1940s (quoted in John Russell’s Matisse: Father and Son) – even the old Matisse was far from the calm, masterful presence one might have imagined, anxious as he was as a father and misunderstood, so he thought, as a husband. For the evidence of his art and his life to add ...”

“... In​ 1993 the soothsayer John Major advised that fifty years hence Britain ‘will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’. Still? That suggests these properties were extant in 1993. And maybe they were, somewhere. The optimist premier equated country with county, with his native patch, Surrey, where the past is never dead but constantly honoured in reproductions of varying degrees of happy bogusness ...”

“... to Lebanon’s Christian heartland in 1991, with the approval of Kissinger’s successor, James Baker – a quid pro quo for Syrian participation in the American war to expel Iraq from Kuwait in 1991. When I reminded an American diplomat in Damascus that the US had given a double benediction to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, he said: ‘That mandate just ...”

“... who watched politely as Mr Logan bought them both massive Italian cream cakes. The friendly young baker smiled at them in an admiring, way and bashfully lamented that his Italian cake shop – he was himself a Bengali – was about to close very soon because of lack of customers. No one knew a good cake from a bad cake these days he grieved. Logan guzzled ...”

“... morning. His horse stumbled. He was killed. She knew it before they told her, and never could Sir John Leslie forget, when he ran downstairs the day they buried him, the beauty of the great lady standing by the window to see the hearse depart, nor, when he came back again, how the curtain, heavy, mid-Victorian, plush perhaps, was all crushed together where ...”

“... representative, ‘we cannot attack; the Jews might attack us in turn.’ In his memoirs, Sir John Glubb tells a rather similar anecdote. When the first independent Syrian government was formed after the 1939-45 war, the President asked for an estimate of the cost of a tank regiment. A British officer included a sum for a workshop. This was immediately ...”

“... Luke’s few miracles contend for attention with the many found in the Acts of Andrew and John. There is space for the snogging Christ, the vindictive Christ, even, in passing, the gay Christ, and Jesus the precocious magician. St Paul fights for space with Marcion and Mani and the early Christianity we think we know today emerges as a useful but ...”

“... of all the tape-recorded interviews he was lucky enough to secure. You could call it the butcher-baker-candlestick-maker method, with many peripheral figures – such as the Exmoor visitor who remembered Gwladys affectionately – being brought in to deliver their comment, and then bowing out of the story. It’s a piecemeal way of going about things, and ...”

“... transcriptions from de Mailla’s 18th-century Histoire générale de la Chine and the writings of John Adams, the head of a great Confucian American dynasty. What awaited them now was a reviving cocktail of Pound’s trademark bohemian-pantheism. The inspiration for the Pisan Cantos was a visionary encounter on a hillside near Sant’ Ambrogio with a barefoot ...”