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“... of victory amounted to an instruction to the British public to forget about Afghanistan,’ Jack Fairweather writes in his powerful history of the war. The instruction was, it seems, hardly needed. The fall of Musa Qala in 2013, ‘once the focus of the British military’s anxiety about their standing in the world, barely registered in the national ...”

“... death. It won an Academy Award. Debbie Reynolds was in a 1964 film version of The Unsinkable Molly Brown, based loosely on the life of one of the most famous of the first-class survivors, which was nominated for six Oscars. With the discovery of the wreck in 1985, some twenty kilometres from where the Titanic had reported its position, the ship’s afterlife ...”

“... corner of the mouth or held in the hand in such a way that the smoke would turn his fingers oak-brown, the felt hat, dark shirt and light tie, which gave him a gangsterish appearance, though more Guys and Dolls Runyonesque than High Sierra Bogartian. I knew, too, that he was queer (the term ‘gay’ wasn’t used then), though I can’t recall just how ...”

“... proof of the Union’s benefit to Scotland – its chief architects, Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown, both of them Scottish, were also the most prominent leaders of the campaign against independence six years later. The role of Paterson’s Bank of England – and the currency it controls – is today the greatest single weakness in the case for ...”

“... told the reporter that he had tried and failed to catch this talking animal, whom he called ‘Jack’ (‘Gef’ came later). He insisted to the reporter that nothing that had happened in his home was ‘supernatural’ – there were ‘no spooks here’. Irving knew that ‘the Dalby Spook’ was the name given to Gef in the wider community of the Isle ...”

“... UK expelled a few of each other’s diplomats. Their secret services stopped co-operating. Gordon Brown refused all meetings with Putin. In London, Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, was told by the Foreign Office to sit tight and wait while the UK tried to find a way to extradite the killers through back-channel negotiations. In 2010 she was still waiting. When ...”

“... and Durkheim in French, alongside works by Weber, Troeltsch, Mannheim, Merton, Parsons, Radcliffe-Brown and more. In his preface he thanks Adorno, Henry Nash Smith, I.A. Richards, Talcott Parsons and Peter Laslett, among others. The standard caricature of the Cambridge-influenced criticism of the postwar years represents it as blunderingly empirical and ...”

“... and then when I fixed I could say: ‘Hey, wait a minute! I gotta feed mah man! He’s hungry, jack!’ You know. ‘Come on, baby, I gotta go first. Mah man’s hungry. He needs some blood!’You can see some of the tattoos in the super-grotty ex-felon pic of him – a cadaverous Nan Goldin-style mug shot – on the cover of Art Pepper: Living Legend ...”

“... I remember how comedians only appeared in Film and Radio Fun long after their vogue had passed. Jack Warner with his catchphrase ‘Mind my bike’ and Joe E. Brown were known to me only as personalities from the comics not from the medium which had originally made them famous. I suppose this might be taken as an ...”

“... a setting – just as Empson had prefigured – fit for her audience with a goddess. Pamela Brown, a statuesque student contralto, played Minerva.‘It is, I believe, the first time English royalty has been given the real old flattery for three hundred years,’ he told his publisher when requesting that the masque be included in his Collected ...”

“... is most often a man and the person assisted off this planet is customarily a woman. In May 1992 Dr Jack Kevorkian ‘helped’ a woman suffering from multiple sclerosis to die. He advocated suicide for her, gave her a ‘suicide consultation’, rigged up his special contraption and fitted on the mask she was to wear. It is evident that sick or aged women are ...”

“... financial sector had left Britain overexposed – in his Keynesian response to the crisis, Gordon Brown had pulled the economy back from the brink of disaster, even into modest growth by the time of the 2010 election. Labour had still gone into that campaign arguing that spending reductions would be necessary (largely at the insistence of ...”

“... and an English nationalist party that would fly the flag of St George, setting aside the Union Jack to await a future in which it might conceivably be recovered as the standard of a ‘United States of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland’. A few years before embarking on his brief bus tour, Goldring had tried to launch a weekly publication dedicated to ...”

“... becomes a series of rescue missions, staged opportunities for heroism worthy of Hollywood: mobs of brown-skinned extras look up to see helicopters – we are saved! The Americans have arrived! Such are the dreams that hover unarticulated in our political unconscious, allowing our leaders to redefine war as humanitarian intervention. The triumph of fantasy ...”

“... the Stage By Mr Theobald’. The 40-year-old Theobald was an attorney by training, and a literary jack-of-all-trades by profession, but his standing as a Shakespeare expert was high. The previous year he had published an impressive book, Shakespeare Restored, challenging what he saw as the errors and complacencies of Alexander Pope’s 1725 edition of the ...”