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“... would now call human rights) activity, much of it conducted in the pub. I therefore grew up with a strong feeling that dissidence, morally admirable though it might appear, was basically a lifestyle choice, fun for natural troublemakers but tough on their families. When I first went to Moscow, in 1966, it was with a firm determination to avoid the two ...”

“... laid across his knees and he began to lecture, his head sunk on his chest but his voice still strong and clear. It was noticeable even in the eight weeks that I attended his lectures that the paralysis was progressive and that he was getting weaker. I fancy that in the final weeks, as he was unable to turn his head, someone sat beside him to move his ...”

“... storm surges, as happened in 1953 and 2013, where a combination of low atmospheric pressure and strong winds can add as much as two metres of sea height to the existing tides. Put these guesstimates together, and Boston’s margin of safety shrinks to the length of a toddler’s arm.Chestnut​ Homes, a private firm based in northern Lincolnshire, formally ...”

“... published in 1908, the year of the first exhibition of airplane flight over Paris and New York. In Roy Norton’s The Vanishing Fleets, gigantic planes, powered by radioactivity and known as Peacemakers, patrol the skies as terrifying guarantors of American power over China and Japan. The Man who Ended War, by Hollis Godfrey, features a radioactive beam that ...”

“... For fifty years, across the changing bay He sailed his patient, scribbled boats away From a strong tower of breath and country clay. The poet wrote until his dying day. The final nail in the coffin came from Stephen Spender, Day Lewis’s old friend and longest surviving hydra head of Roy Campbell’s monstrous ...”

“... Returning to St Denis, Doriot became a moderate member of the Young Socialists, but his strong autodidactic urge found expression in an endless diet of Western penny dreadfuls rather than in the political classics. Politicised by war, but also confused by it, he earned a greater reputation for a love of adventure and drama than for radicalism. When ...”

“... compelled to criticise. Wherever it appears, Scarry says, beauty produces the same experience: a strong, almost physical sensation of pleasure which blends the need to stop and stare at the beautiful thing with the urge to connect it with the rest of the world: ‘Beauty causes us to gape and suspend all thought ... but simultaneously what is beautiful ...”

“... to America after her second marriage, despite his pleas to her as a 14-year old boy – ‘left a strong presumption of illegitimacy’. Edwards lays great stress on the consequences of this rejection, speculating, for example, that later successful attempts to establish a relationship with his mother were a major factor in his otherwise inexplicably long ...”

“... a convert to Evangelicalism. Gladstone’s ‘rescue work’ was undoubtedly the product of a very strong sexual drive. But it was sublimated. One can be as sure as one can be of anything that he was never guilty of what he described as ‘the act which is known as infidelity of the marriage bed’. He made a solemn declaration to that effect shortly before he ...”

“... on surprise – even by the fourth plane, it was impossible to repeat. Had al-Qaida ever been a strong organisation, it would have aimed its blows at client states of America in the Middle East, where the overthrow of a regime would make a political difference, rather than at America itself, where it could not leave so much as a strategic pinprick. As ...”

“... unanswered. O’Brien reiterated his position in his memoirs, published three years ago, adding Roy Welensky, the Prime Minister of the CAF, to the list of those who had been involved. Smith, who had been the Secretary-General’s personal assistant, maintained a keen interest in the affair until his death in 1995. I have had a preliminary look at his ...”

“... another attempt at a form of Indian magical realism in the wake of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy. No one has telepathic or supernatural powers here; time is broadly Newtonian in its flow. This is a novel that wants to be realistic, even if the realism is meant to be understood as tinged with black comedy. There may even be some moralising intention, with ...”

“... Is there any reason to believe that things will be different this time? No home secretary since Roy Jenkins, and hardly any before him, has presided over an extension of our liberties. Blunkett did not buck this trend. At a time when, it turned out, Britain needed a home secretary with a keen understanding of the balance between liberty and security, we ...”

“... and his acolytes – has come under heavy fire from Enlightenment champions such as the late Roy Porter. The polarities echo tensions in the period itself, when images of a brave new world of self-governing, go-getting individuals collided with fears of moral anarchy. The elevation of once despised, divinely forbidden desires – for ...”

“... two female striped hyenas for the museum’; they are kept in the guest house and have ‘a strong, musky smell’. Two days later: ‘The hyenas are smelling worse and worse … Griaule dreamed that his bed was full of snakes (by association with the smell of the snake house at the Jardin des Plantes).’ The thought of France is never far away: both a ...”