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“... salmonella’). Then there is the long line of sex-scandal casualties: Cecil Parkinson, Tim Yeo, David Mellor (greatly exaggerated, but not his only alleged misdemeanour), Hartley Booth, Michael Brown (though he is a borderline case, since he resigned from office while denying allegations that he had had a homosexual relationship). We should also not forget ...”

“... and, according to official figures, killed around 12,000 in combat, though the real figure, in David Anderson’s view, is ‘likely to have been more than 20,000’. In addition, Caroline Elkins claims, up to 100,000 died in the detention camps. It is the scale of the British atrocities in Kenya that is the most startling revelation of these books. We ...”

“... its failure to maintain the extraordinary industrial and scientific leadership it once attained. David Edgerton’s book, the more academic of the two, is a brilliant and often very aggressive challenge to a set of assumptions about the recent past. James Hamilton-Paterson, still one of England’s most skilled and alluring prose writers in or out of ...”

“... of life now reigns in the thinking stratum of Chinese society, especially among the young. David Rice’s Dragon’s Brood is a marvellously fresh and immediate evocation of this confusion at what one might call the first level of perception – that of the serious visit. Rice is innocent of any real knowledge of Chinese culture or Chinese history, and ...”

“... Early in the first part of his three-volume, 1500-page Portrait of the Man and His Work, A. David Moody, in a section of a chapter also entitled ‘Suburban Prejudice’, cites the same story, but points out that in the summers of 1902 and 1903 Homer Pound and his wife let their house to ‘Mr W.B. Hackenburg, president of the Jewish Hospital ...”

“... the one person Genghiz had feared and respected.) Kitbuga may have been inspired to try playing David at Goliath’s Spring: at any rate he attacked the Sultan (who inspired his own soldiers with the cry of ‘O Islam’) without the usual Mongol craft and precaution, and lost his army and his life. Had Hulagu been able to return he would certainly have ...”

“... Dillon, and rushed back to Kennedy, who gave Dillon the job. Graham also recommended his friend David Bruce for Secretary of State, advice the President-elect didn’t take, choosing Dean Rusk instead. At Graham’s suggestion, Bruce became Ambassador in London, and before very long Graham was badgering Kennedy to sack Rusk and give the job to Bruce. Philip ...”

“... to Robert Harris, with the memorable line: ‘Fuck Dacre, publish.’ Meanwhile the historian David Irving denounced the diaries as fakes, on the radio and television of three countries, although he had no sound evidence for saying so. Two weeks later, when everyone else was saying they were fakes, he made the front page of the Daily Express and the Times ...”

“... and rightly emphasise. ‘The commanding heights of the economy’ – gas, railways, coal, steel – were handed over to the civil servants, a measure of doubtful benefit to anyone, but nobody was going to the guillotine to protest about that. A system of national insurance had been created that benefited all classes, not simply the poor and ...”

“... in the late 1960s, are no longer central to his achievement. Cutting It Short isn’t the David Lodge novel that its English title seems to promise; indeed, one of the things that is to be docked – twice, and excruciatingly – by the heroine, who happens to be Hrabal’s mother, Marie, is the tail of a dog. This was the 1920s, and suddenly ...”

“... Pissarro, Renoir and Degas. Nowadays, the transnational squillionnaires who have replaced those steel and railroad barons seek personal validation through contact with a different Big Four – Warhol, Basquiat, Koons and Hirst – their eye chaperoned not by a practitioner like Cassatt but by sleek art advisers who can run the numbers, and often take a ...”

“... Wilson could imitate his true identity as a bluff, plain-speaking Yorkshireman to perfection. David Cameron once worked for a public relations agency and looks as though he was assembled by one. From Reagan to Schwarzenegger, the line between politics and performance has become increasingly blurred: during the US presidential debates, a soi-disant ...”

“... with it than anybody’; Jules Olitski’s shifting colours; Anthony Caro’s decisively abstract steel sculptures. Karen Wilkin writes in the catalogue of his collection that Greenberg didn’t miss the art he sold, but surely he winced as works by David Smith, Jackson Pollock or Morris Louis went out the door.* His ...”

“... to have given up his rather clunky artistic ambitions (to frame his friends ‘in the heavy steel webs of metaphors which will last half as long as [Alexandria] itself’) and says he is thinking of writing a book of criticism, his friend Clea, a painter, hits him across the mouth so hard he has to go to the bathroom to mop up the blood. Among the ...”

“... identification. A chapter of Backroom Boys tracks the process by which two Cambridge students, David Braben and Ian Bell, used elegant mathematical fixes to get round the limited memory available on home computers in the early 1980s while writing an epoch-making computer game, Elite: Whether the components are atoms or bits, ideas or ...”