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“... wrote to Gilbert Murray – in that British tradition of biting melancholy that runs at least from Johnson to Larkin – ‘the state of mankind always had been and always would be a state of just tolerable discomfort,’ there was some comfort, and some justness, in that kind of truthfulness. Even if perfectionism was covert religion, trying to get things ...”

“... Speaking’) on feminism, Gorbachev and deconstruction, which is in some ways engagingly frank about its aims, in some ways (I think) mistaken in achieving them. He sets out to perform ‘a great service ... to the dwindling body of linguistic reactionaries’ – namely, to provide an argument for the use of he as opposed to he or she, s/he etc. He ...”

“... Peterley Harvest has been overlooked by Mr Graves (who uses the evidence of commentators such as Frank Harris): but who can doubt that the non-existent Peterley was among the audience at the Senate House that May afternoon in 1933, and that we are reading an exact, first-hand account from this invisible man? Housman rose, placed a brown-covered small octavo ...”

“... own dignity and secure their own liberty. But as one of the leading historians of slavery, Walter Johnson, recently observed, much of the newer scholarship has been incorporated into the triumphalist narrative. The reductio ad absurdum of this process was George W. Bush’s speech in the summer of 2003, on Gorée Island off the coast of Senegal – a ...”

“... consultants they plan to remake Afghanistan in much the way their forebears in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations sought to forge a new Vietnam alongside the backroom boys from the Rand Corporation. As in Vietnam, indigenous resistance to the American project is hindering its realisation. Security is an obsession, the precondition for achieving the ...”

“... justice’. He had recently stepped down as director of public prosecutions when his local MP, Frank Dobson, announced his retirement. Starmer entered the race to replace him as the member for Holborn and St Pancras. He was a political unknown in a crowded field, facing past and present leaders of Camden Council as well as a popular local doctor. He drank ...”

“... the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, were to blame for the severity of the pandemic. ‘We must be frank about one of the primary reasons this outbreak spun out of control,’ Azar said.There was a failure by this organisation to obtain the information that the world needed, and that failure cost many lives … In an apparent attempt to conceal this ...”

“... had installed itself in the KPD headquarters, now conveniently vacant. Liddell was assisted by Frank Foley, MI6’s Berlin station chief, whose diplomatic cover was passport control officer. On 31 March, the two men entered Karl Liebknecht Haus, now renamed Horst Wessel Haus and sporting a huge swastika where only weeks earlier Lenin had stared out from a ...”

“... translation. See Nations slowly wise, and meanly just, To buried Merit raise the tardy Bust, Dr Johnson remarked, but it isn’t the Danes who are raising this ‘tardy Bust’ to their own most famous son. They continue to affect the humorous indifference and condescending contempt which for more than a hundred years have been blinding them to the truth ...”

“... role in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The new direction promised by Kennedy was shortlived. Lyndon Johnson showed little interest in Africa and normalised relations with Portugal.Portugal had valuable colonies in Africa besides Angola. One of them was Mozambique. In 1963, Eduardo Mondlane, the leader of Frelimo, approached Robert Kennedy in the hope of ...”

“... made deep incursions into the territory of English letters, pruning all rhetorical exuberance with frank impiety. He needed Joyce to be Irish; he needed a mentor to be remote from the centre and thus to be a writer who would, by necessity, break moulds; it could somehow justify Argentina and its terrible distance from where life or letters began. Flann ...”

“... Burke, Berkeley, Goldsmith, Swift: ‘four great minds that hated Whiggery’. This might be Dr Johnson calling Bathurst ‘a very good hater’ because ‘he hated a rogue, and he hated a Whig’: Yeats is trying out right-wing animus in an 18th-century guise. But the markers of a late paradigm were moving into position. Hatred is becoming the natural ...”

“... tinge’ to them. When the Proud Boys’ founder, Gavin McInnes, and the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, descended on Columbia’s New York campus to defend Jewish students from ‘antisemitic’ protesters (among them Jews holding liberation seders), they looked as though they’d convened a 6 January reunion. For all their claims to isolation in a sea of ...”

“... ideals and values’ in the wringer-washer on the back porch (where it usually was in Frank Capra’s films) and they came out cleansed of any taint of humiliation. We could hold our heads high again. We could reconsecrate the marriage of virtue and power. (The first-person plural was easily conflated with ‘the nation’ and ‘the ...”

“... the views of the medical profession. It didn’t work. Tony Blair’s first health minister, Frank Dobson, read its funeral rites when Labour came to power seven years later. Yet at the turn of the millennium, Alan Milburn replaced Dobson and Labour introduced a new, more radical version of that market. It was Labour that introduced foundation ...”