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“... trusted to keep them. When the younger Bush, after the 2006 election, brought in Gates to replace Donald Rumsfeld at defence, he would have had in mind that history of loyalty to the Bush family. With Abu Ghraib and Bagram and Guantánamo to think of, Gates was a man to trust. Also, Gates might help to slow and muffle the incessant pressure from Cheney and ...”

“... were spotted over US airbases in East Anglia. After his enthusiasm for this sort of thing came to light, the Sun contacted John Hanson, one of the book’s authors, who declared that ‘any sensible person’ would be interested in a phenomenon ‘that has baffled mankind for millennia’.The extent to which Philip was a sensible person remains open to ...”

“... embryo of a new world governed by atavistic fears, whose most malign symptom is the presidency of Donald Trump. Pfeffer, a correspondent for Haaretz, has written a biography of Benjamin Netanyahu as a way of explaining today’s Israel – by no means an enviable task. Say what you will about Netanyahu’s predecessors, they had their fascination, from the ...”

“... her a kind of Bowie figure for many younger listeners who may never have heard of Sol LeWitt or Donald Judd, Robert Pruitt or Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, before Solange referenced them. There’s a fascinating autodidact’s story there, I think, which is very different from today’s more usual social media dream of effortless, instantaneous global ...”

“... Out of the upheaval in 1965 which led to the departure of the other Welsh thruster, Donald Baverstock, he emerged triumphantly as Controller of Programmes, Television, or C.P. Tel. in the old Civil Service terminology of the BBC. Finally he succeeded Kenneth Adam in the top job to become the first managing director of the service, or ...”

“... extent still is in) over Mrs Henniker; he also manages to see her in a new and more prosaic light.’ There are indeed biographical elements in the text, but they have little to do with its power. The poet and the lady are satirised, but Hardy also endorses their spiritual affinity; they are doomed lovers who achieve an uncanny union through the shadows ...”

“... on such subjects as Public Notices, Beards, Memory and Growing Old, the tone of voice – light, jokey, a touch valetudinarian – reminds one of an earlier small-former and radio star: Beerbohm. There is an ease of reference, and even the same touch of deliberate antiquarianism: Sparrow must be the last person in England still referring to the TES as ...”

“... in a conformist desert. But however heavy the yoke of opinion, that of law was undoubtedly light. Alexander Herzen commented that ‘in England the policeman at your door or within your doors adds a feeling of security.’ Malwida von Meysenburg experienced ‘a pleasant feeling of freedom’ when no one asked to see her passport on her ...”

“... Lord Blyth) was chairman of Defence Sales until he left to join the Board of Plessey. Lt Gen Donald Isles had been director of weapons in the Ministry of Defence and was now a director of James’s own company, BMARC, as was Jonathan Aitken who had close links to the Saudi Royal Family, and Stefanus Adolphus Kock, a leading British intelligence agent and ...”

“... The generational divide is the one that still counts above all, but it appears in a very different light now compared with just a few weeks ago.What is society, then, to the likes of Whitty and Vallance, the men whom Johnson is said to be obeying so loyally? Ultimately it is a network, made up of billions of interconnected nodes. You can try to impose a nation ...”

“... became unprofitable or unmanageable, gorse, broom and blackberry took over. There was much light and much wind. In summer gorse fires threw up dense billowing columns of brown smoke, broken by bursts of orange flame. The fire engines came, another patch of blackened hillside was born, but the houses seemed to withstand it – the thin, dry furze must ...”

“... to get a deal to write a book of criticism on John Barth, Robert Coover, Rudolph Wurlitzer and Donald Barthelme. The proposal was rejected. Though ‘crushed at the time’, White was later glad, because metafiction ‘no longer intrigues’ him ‘or anyone else’. It’s ‘the sort of storytelling,’ he writes in City Boy, that is ‘hyperconscious of ...”

“... Soon​ after firing James Comey, Donald Trump baited the former FBI director. ‘Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!’ Trump tweeted. Comey replied a month later, while testifying before the Senate intelligence committee. ‘Lordy,’ he said, ‘I hope there are tapes ...”

“... before, or a piece of sculpture. In 1971 there was work there in my school holidays. I held a light from the wings on a production of Murder in the Cathedral. I remember vividly shining it on the actresses in the chorus as they chanted: Does the bird sing in the south? Only the sea bird cries Driven inland by the storm. What sign of the spring of the ...”

“... scholars worry especially about his reputation in America and the UK. ‘For English readers,’ Donald Prater writes in his biography of Mann, ‘the humour of which he was so proud is faint.’ Prater is discussing the four Joseph novels (1933, 1934, 1936, 1943), but as far as I know English-speaking readers have not found Buddenbrooks (1901) or The Magic ...”