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“... or the magical or any such claptrap. I despise myths and legends and their ilk. I believe that Richard Dawkins does not go nearly far enough when he says that astrologers should be prosecuted for fraud. Instead, priests and imams and monks and rabbis from every religion should be thrown into prison, unless and until they can prove the truth of their ...”

“... But this is no longer necessarily true, as has been pointed out in these pages before now: there may be more people living now than all the people who have ever died. With over 5.4 billion of us alive today, on course to become 8.5 billion by 2025, we must think of the outnumbering dead as outnumbered – at least until population slows (at perhaps ten ...”

“... foreign immigrants recently started drying up too, and those megapolises are now shrinking. London may be about to go the same way.I first arrived in St Albans one fine afternoon in late September. The schools were coming out. The boys and girls in their neat uniforms looked happy: black, Asian and white children laughing and chatting together. But a ...”

“... British manufactures out of some foreign markets. Industrial production in the UK contracted in May. At some point, it is believed, businesses will fail, throwing their workers onto the state, and the British public finances will disintegrate: a long period of prosperity will come to an end. Like all defensive alliances, the euro is also an act of ...”

“... fighting so far. In the course of the last few meetings the English had overcome whatever awe they may have had of the great Spanish array and this time they came in close, firing low at a hundred yards or less (the round-shot of the time was neither accurate nor very dangerous at over two hundred yards, but at one hundred, or as Winter of the Vanguard put it ...”

“... Mussulman manner, into the sea for infidelity, and avenged by a young Venetian, her lover’. It may be that Byron was in the nick of time to prevent a girl he had seduced from being dumped in the Aegean. The fineness of the poem does not depend on his exposure to the practice but on his deep sense of involvement with the principle. Fragment or no, ‘The ...”

“... but Nelson Mandela’s, shamelessly plundered from James Meek’s essay in the LRB of 26 May. Thistlewood put it more bluntly: ‘Insurrection then became a public duty.’ He did not possess a particle of Mandela’s grace and generosity, but his argument was essentially the same. As the chief justice prepared to deliver the death ...”

“... The moment had come to fix the blame where it properly belonged: not on Lyndon Johnson, not on Richard Nixon, but, as Burke points out, on the oldest story in the world, ‘the seductive woman who turns out to be a snake’. Last year, the Fonda cult allowed thousands, even millions of anguished veterans and their sympathisers to hold onto their shaky ...”

“... when in reality he was just a biddable grafter like the rest. Is it possible that such critiques may rest on not having actually read much of Burke? Certainly Berlin, in his generous way, conceded in a correspondence with O’Brien that ‘I really should not argue with you about Burke. I know virtually nothing about him except what most people know – the ...”

“... on Cheney’s either. The Sharon analogy speaks powerfully against Klein’s analysis. Free trade may be ‘an imperial project’, as she argues, but this does not mean that all imperial projects are primarily concerned with ‘seizing new markets directly for Western multinationals on the battlefields of pre-emptive wars’. Other goals, such as destroying ...”

“... broached brandy bottle is characteristic of Hughes’s practical canniness. Two months later (22 May 1956) he is telling Olwyn:I have met a first-rate American poetess. She really is good. Certainly one of the best female poets I ever read, and a damn sight better than the run of good male. Her main enthusiasm at present is me, and she thinks my verses are ...”

“... letter to an MP, ‘I cannot say free, but rather, as one brought over in a Coffin, out of which I may not peep, until the protection of this Parliament unlock it, and say, Arise Freeman and walk.’ This petitioner and his desperate associates were not confident that they would be vindicated in their appeals, even though they had one trump card up their ...”

“... The context had shifted radically, but their reflexes remained the same. This failure to adapt may have been to some extent self-serving. So long as America appeared seriously endangered, the neo-cons could continue to inflate their own importance, admiring and advertising themselves as the only Americans capable of understanding the formidable dimensions ...”

“... contributions made, mostly in the Stalin period, by agents of nerve and cunning. These included Richard Sorge, the spy who penetrated the Japanese foreign office to provide his government with the clearest possible warning of a German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941; Teodor Maly, the Hungarian-born agent who spotted Kim Philby’s talents in mid-Thirties ...”

“... He takes us through the psychology of vision by a route familiar to anyone who has read Richard Gregory. There follows a brief account of neuroanatomy in general and the primate visual system in particular, where he has been somewhat upstaged by the superb new book by the visual physiologist Semir Zeki, A Vision of the Brain.* In fact, it is only ...”