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“... the gullible midget hero.’ This insistence on shining a new light on unlikely sexual relations may help explain why the original version of Freaks was heavily cut and edited and no longer exists; why the film, even in its edited state, was banned in Britain for thirty years; and why American audiences flocked to see it in some places ...”

“... think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of ...”

“... issue the call to prayer. ‘Once you scrutinise you will always find something, however small it may be,’ the anonymous author of the Trojan Horse letter wrote. ‘By that time the damage is done.’ Michael Gove had already vented his views on sinister Islamic plots in 2006, in his book Celsius 7/7: ‘There are many Muslims across the globe, within ...”

“... finally determine what the poem says.’ ‘This is not to say,’ he adds, ‘that the same man may not be both historical scholar and critic,’ but such a man would be exercising two talents at discrete times rather than combining them in ways that respected the integrity of each. The conclusion (unhappy for many) is that the effects of one’s actions ...”

“... or another. Yet even from the restricted sample quoted something else, not so easily classified, may spring to the eye. Most such ethno-nationalist conflicts seem to happen in predominantly rural situations. Nor are they rural merely in the sense of being agricultural or non-urban – like East Anglia, say, or the Beauce plain in central France – they are ...”

“... its use, whether state of war or threat of war or any other public emergency; none of these may be invoked as a justification. Orders from superiors are explicitly excluded as a defence, and moreover the Convention requires that wherever the torture occurred and whatever the nationality of the torturer or victim, parties must prosecute or extradite ...”

“... of women admirers and aristocratic protectors he met and corresponded with, the women who were or may have been his mistresses, even the children he enchanted with his stories – all these form a network of intimate relationships stretching across almost the entire Continent and centred on the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy, whose decay, collapse and ...”

“... spectacle it afforded: the almost physical manifestation of Trump’s deference to Putin. It may happen again, whether as a result of the volume of sabre-rattling or the onset of war with Iran; a decision to sack Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating meddling in the 2016 election; a shutdown of the federal government to extort funds ...”

“... little place is The Little Town! But for me it’s only a temporary setting. While this letter may seem harmless in tone, it is an example of the lifelong rivalry between the brothers, which Thomas felt more keenly than Heinrich. It was a gentle way of twisting the knife, letting Heinrich know that his brother had not merely written the definitive novel ...”

“... It made​ perfect sense that the first port of call on President Trump’s first foreign trip, in May, was Riyadh. Saudi Arabia – the world’s second largest oil producer (after Russia), the world’s biggest military spender as a proportion of GDP, the main sponsor of Islamist fighting groups across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and Iraq, the leader of a coalition in a devastating war against Yemeni rebels now in its third year – is a country one can do business with, even as the most ardent Kremlinologists in the West struggle to understand it ...”

“... formal shape to the very different poem that goes, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad./They may not mean to but they do’), I began to realise the flexibility as well as the power and memorability of good ‘formal’ verse. And when, after many months of cajoling, I got Tim to show me some of his own poems – he had not at the time published a book ...”

“... the police had no conclusive evidence against any of the four by the end of the first week in May, although in law this would not have prevented them from making arrests. On 6 May the Lawrences met Nelson Mandela. Speaking of the police, Doreen Lawrence remarked: ‘They are patronising us and when they do that to me I ...”

“... synonymous with (among other liberations) sexual liberation, and he behaved like Hugh Heffner or Richard Neville. His playboy aspect means he is dismissed as a lightweight by those who claim to know what is serious in Russia; but he gave a pungent and rousing speech. ‘The trouble we have in becoming popular,’ he said at one point, ‘is that a lot of ...”

“... makes Basilius irresponsible. Sometimes Norbrooke’s valuable insistence on political content may be taken too far. In the ‘Jocabethan’ admiration for the republican constitution of Venice he finds another key to the conservatism of Jonson, who ‘pointedly set Volpone in the mercantile republic of Venice, and showed that its vaunted claims for ...”

“... she felt Thomas had become ‘vain’ in his learning. It was clearly a damaging thing to do, and may have contributed to de Quincey’s opting, in his mature prose style, for the florid sentence, as a kind of revenge for the interruption of his linguistic training. Thomas was henceforth cast from tutor to tutor, and his only consolation was that he had made ...”