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“... isn’t like that,’ they’re off the hook. 20 February. We’re gradually assembling a class: James Corden, who’s plump and funny and at the audition entirely takes charge; Sacha Dhawan, an Asian boy from Manchester who complains that all he’s ever offered these days are Muslim terrorists or Afghan refugees; Jamie Parker, who is to play Scripps the ...”

“... years the ability to sort and retrieve immense amounts of data. He’d seen the way Putnam – stern, captious, venerated, feared, a ‘tyrant and megalomaniac’, a demander of ‘unflinching loyalty’ – nurtured a ‘powerful institutional identification among the library’s employees, insisting that clerks and librarians subordinate their desires to ...”

“... although thanks to Hassan, there were still 164,000 files to be processed. The following year, James Baker, Bush Senior’s former secretary of state, was appointed as special envoy to Kofi Annan and matters began to proceed with more vigour, even though the referendum was now six years behind schedule. Hassan had got his way with some, at least, of the ...”

“... disgraceful trial and prison sentences for the little forger-crook Kujau and the Hitler-bedazzled Stern journalist Heidemann. Eight months’ research into the background proved to me that there were very different political forces and psychological motivations behind this deplorable episode from what had been assumed: but the idea was generally ...”

“... contestants, but record-holding champions.1 This would be, as Brynjolfsson and McAfee say, ‘a stern test of a computer’s pattern matching and complex communication abilities’, much more demanding than another IBM project, the chess computer Deep Blue, which won a match against the world champion Gary Kasparov in 1997. Chess is vulnerable to brute ...”

“... Lobby Practice, the slimmest of slim volumes, bound in burgundy rexine, which carries among other stern injunctions – ‘Do not “see” anything in the Members’ Lobby’, ‘Do not run after a minister’ – the overarching commandment: ‘Members of the lobby are under an obligation to keep secret the fact that such meetings are held and to avoid ...”

“... on A.E. Housman as a classical scholar or his influential meditation on ‘The Ambiguity of Henry James’. In 1940 he published To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, his account of the revolutionary tradition from Michelet through Marx and up to the Bolsheviks. This may look like the one among his works that was wholly ...”

“... to the Holocaust, or to the events of 7 October. These anxieties shouldn’t be dismissed. But, as James Baldwin wrote in the late 1960s, ‘one does not wish … to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro’s suffering. It isn’t, and one knows it isn’t from the very tone in which he assures you that it is.’The ...”

“... Fyers for persistently importuning in the tube station at South Kensington, but his sympathy was stern: ‘Whatever penalty I inflict will be as nothing compared with the punishment he has brought upon himself by his own action.’The attention paid to cases involving toffs, most notably Lord Montagu’s trial and imprisonment in 1954, creates a tabloid ...”

“... mime of activity, its sirens and flashing lights, was organised like the final, formulaic act of a James Bond movie. Another mad scheme for world domination revealed. Another doomsday weapon defused. Bond movies, up to now, were way beyond North Greenwich’s ambitions. The old gasworks had featured in the odd episode of Dr Who and even, curiously, as the set ...”

“... off-key suggestion that the secret services should be recruiting in Bradford rather than St James’s (apparently on the grounds that immigrants would find it easier than Old Etonians to disguise themselves as Islamic extremists). But almost the oddest response has been our terrified certainty that there remains a plentiful supply of suicide pilots and ...”

“... Gillian’s decision at sixteen to change her surname from that of Leslie Stone, her ‘strict … stern’ biological father, to that of Irving Rose, the ‘kind, equanimous, humorous’ Irishman her mother married next; the fabulously ‘over-ripe’ interpretation she develops, the Rock of Zion and the Romance of the Rose, with the help of Joan Lindsay’s ...”

“... hush up an accusation of sexual abuse in the choir? The discrepancy of tone in Virtually Normal, stern with mavericks, soft on institutions, is not normal but virtually pathological. It should go without saying that after the null bumblings of Spencer’s prose Sullivan comes dangerously close to looking like a master stylist. He turns the occasional neat ...”

“... First Letter to the Corinthians, the passage about love, with Father Jolliffe opting for the King James version using charity. He took time at the start of the reading to explain to the congregation that charity was love and not anything to do with flag days or people in doorways. Or if it was to do with people in doorways that was only one of its ...”

“... him inevitable that he should behave as a member of its established church. He was married in St James’s, Piccadilly, and sometimes he accompanied me to church. How deep this went was not a question that either of us was disposed to pursue, though for different reasons: I because, though, when I went away to school, I encountered boys who were Jews by ...”