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“... went to live with her great-aunt at the château of Saint-Maurice-de-Rémens, thirty miles north-east of Lyon, a house with an immense garden, mountains in the distance and country all around. This was the true home of Saint-Exupéry’s childhood, and in retrospect the happiest, perhaps the only happy, time of his life. He was the heir, the little ...”

“... between the old Roman roads of Watling Street, running east to west, and Ryknild Street, running north to south, might also put it in an area convenient for neutral assemblies. Where better to share out the loot from a successful campaign? As for the historical issue of date, one clue is the presence of eight definitely Christian items, including the ...”

“... kind of thing. Is there any greater possibility of present-day conditions in Western Europe and North America fostering the rise of a ‘Modern Prince’? Perhaps there is. However, the reader can come away from all three of these Euro-communist treatises without the slightest notion of why, or how, in any concrete sense. They remain encamped upon that ...”

“... For months​ after I was summoned to appear for jury duty in North London, I couldn’t stop asking people – in England, in America – if they’d ever been called up too. The question worked less well here, where 65 per cent of people will never be jurors, but nearly all the Americans I talked to seemed to have done it – or to have got out of it by saying ‘I don’t trust the police,’ or being opposed to the death penalty, or having been the victim of a violent crime, or being a lawyer ...”

“... Industry (Blackwell, £19.99). The technology that made the network possible had been devised by Paul Baran in the US and Donald Davies in the UK, working independently of each other – the Newton and Leibniz of the information age. ‘Packet switching’ allows data to be broken up into units (‘packets’) of a manageable and standard size, which can ...”

“... strangeness of how quickly the Society gained official endorsement and a legal identity from Pope Paul III in 1540. Here was a proposed corporation that proclaimed no special purpose beyond being ‘beneficial to souls’; some of its efforts had already petered out in fiasco, one being the launch of a mission of Christian evangelism to Ottoman-ruled ...”

“... index was measured in units that corresponded to the rate of heat loss; one of the geographers, Paul Siple, later regretted this, as the use of units was often taken to imply that the index was an alternative temperature scale. This past winter a US-Canadian team unveiled a new wind chill index without the Celsius figure attached. In time, those numbers ...”

“... might have worked is long gone. A CNN interviewer asked me if Ebola might spread to Europe and North America. ‘Of course it will,’ I replied. ‘We live in a global economy.’ On 30 September, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first diagnosis of the disease in the United States. A traveller from Liberia, asymptomatic (by ...”

“... Paul Johnson’s thousand-page book is geared to the present age of long print runs and mass marketing. It is one of the currently popular narrative histories written by Britons who position themselves mid-Atlantic, in order to address the American reader. At a thousand pages Johnson’s book is longer than Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 1988 (subtitle, ‘Economic Change and Military Conflict, 1500-2000’), or Simon Schama’s Citizens, 1989 ...”

“... to view it for what it is, instinctively reaching back instead to the things we think we know. As Paul Theroux remarks in Riding the Iron Rooster, ‘China exists so distinctly in people’s minds that it is hard to shake the fantasy loose and see the real China.’ Here, then, are four authors taking different routes to ‘the real China’, each carrying ...”

“... Wisconsin with a population of around eight thousand. The state capital, Madison, is 34 miles north-west and Milwaukee about 60 miles away, east-northeast. Jonathan Williams, of Jargon Press, visited Niedecker in 1962, a year before her second marriage to Albert Millen and subsequent move to Milwaukee: Miss Niedecker, I guess in her fifties by now, lives ...”

“... on a courtesy visit to the USSR, as it then was, in 1988, a party which included Craig Raine, Paul Bailey and Timothy Mo. I don’t remember laughing more on any trip before or since; we were a very silly group, so much so that we often mystified our hosts and sometimes behaved disgracefully. Sue – and I even noticed this in the photo the Guardian used ...”

“... from the air force that was busy laying waste to the countryside. Three days after arriving in the North Vietnamese capital he and his colleagues were taken to a site in the deep jungle. There, in the searing tropical heat, at the end of a track called the Path of the Cockerel, they saw a perfect miniature replica of their own workplace, Lenin’s mausoleum on ...”

“... Poets’ Theatre staged pieces by Samuel Beckett (who was a childhood friend of Molly Howe’s), Paul Goodman, James Merrill, Ted Hughes and Kenneth Koch, as well as numerous Noh plays and classics such as The Changeling, in which Lang took the role of the bawdy chambermaid. In 1952 and 1954 respectively, the troupe performed Lang’s own two verse ...”

“... Paul Johnson is one of the most indefatigable writers on either side of the Atlantic. In the past twenty years, the former editor of the New Statesman turned ardent Thatcherite has produced, among other books, The Birth of the Modern (weighing in at more than a thousand pages), Modern Times, a massive chronicle of the 20th century, and lengthy histories of Christianity and Judaism ...”