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“... Rév is the guardian of great stores of the past century’s lies and half-truths, deceptions and self-deceptions, representations and re-representations of mass horror and private mendacity, at all levels from the highest councils of state to the lowliest policeman. With sober, biting but never ingenuous hopefulness, he wrings its truths from the dross of ...”

“... antagonism or independence. But there is a poetry of pliancy which differs from mere propaganda or self-abasement. In this poetry, the words on the page bring with them an awareness that they might have been different: the strain on the bent knee is kept in view. No one, after all, would take praise in a panegyric as being merely true: the ‘judgment’ it ...”

“... was thought likely to get a first but didn’t; he was understandably a little mortified but his self-reproach can’t have been helped when he received a note from McFarlane saying, ‘Here are your marks and pretty miserable they are, too.’ Others of his year with less resilience than Adam received similar notes and I find this hard to understand, let ...”

“... control. ‘Elite rule is an inevitable by-product of secrecy,’ the American political scientist Robert Dahl noted in 1953. ‘Those who effectively influence policy can scarcely exceed the number of those who possess the information to act.’ Yet democratically elected governments have always marked out things their own citizens are not allowed to ...”

“... imitating her squint against sunlight. The writers she is most directly associated with – Robert Creeley and Ed Dorn – were of the Black Mountain School, but she seems somehow to have more to do with the Beats, perhaps because she was always on the run; perhaps because of the drug addiction of her third husband, Buddy Berlin; perhaps because you can ...”

“... Angola. One of them was Mozambique. In 1963, Eduardo Mondlane, the leader of Frelimo, approached Robert Kennedy in the hope of securing funding. Kennedy was impressed with Mondlane and offered him $60,000 through the Ford Foundation, which, as Williams points out, was closely linked to the CIA. This didn’t sit well with the Soviets, who were supporting ...”

“... declares at the beginning of his memoir, has been ‘a rich, multifaceted and unique story’. Self-flattery is characteristically Lanzmannian, but its truth in this case can hardly be denied. He has lived on a grand scale. A teenage fighter in the Resistance, he became Sartre’s protégé in the early 1950s as an editor at Les Temps modernes. He also ...”

“... highlands – his kingdom had withstood Europeans before. With Napoleon threatening Europe, Robert Brownrigg, the British governor at Colombo, was instructed not to drain the treasury with an unnecessary adventure. But he was ambitious for rank and title, and so found an excuse: King Vikrama, he claimed, had committed acts of barbarism against local ...”

“... gives them a compelling honesty and edge. In his novels, he sought to explore the parts of the self which most of us seek to conceal. He was also concerned with style, with how you write a sentence, how you control the music and rhythms of prose. Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924, the eldest of a large family. His father died when he was 19. ‘On the ...”

“... a most subversive idea, a new way of killing your father, starting from scratch, creating a new self. I became a revisionist, luckily, just as the word was coming into vogue; it was a term of abuse used about historians who were peddling anti-nationalist views of Irish history. The most seriously revisionist text, however, to appear in those years was John ...”

“... is a forbidden transgression that is also a universal fact. He draws a transgressive moral from Robert Musil: ‘The many sexual combinations exhibited in The Man without Qualities testify to the great truth that all knowledge of the other, all intercourse between opposites, is analogous to carnal knowledge. It is an idea ready for political ...”

“... a politics of one or another kind of ‘national socialism’. In order to avoid a return to such self-defeating strategies, the International Monetary and Financial Conference of the United and Associated Nations at Bretton Woods in 1944 agreed to restore stability with a new kind of gold standard, to recover prosperity by means of freed international ...”

“... evangelical activity which we habitually associate with Puritan opposition. It was a surprisingly self-confident church, too. In its infancy, under Elizabeth, its very survival had been doubtful. The improvised combination of Calvinist theology and episcopal government had seemed frail and eccentric. But as the decades passed, the morale and the standing of ...”

“... society exists to serve the economy, and not the other way around. True, the Secretary of Labour Robert Reich and other members of the Clinton Administration have rather suddenly taken to criticising the mass firings on the part of major corporations in general and of AT & T in particular (40,000 initially budgeted for, later reduced to 18,000). But at the ...”

“... political landscape, the nation and national pride bulk ever larger, bolstering our sense of self-worth, tickling up our resentments. This emboldened nationalism has a weather-beaten old ally in the shape of the popular newspapers, which are jubilant about Brexit, not without reason regarding its achievement as largely their own work – ‘yes, we did ...”