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“... his salary in 1986 was $550 million, which, on the Buchan-approved capitalisation model of Sir William Petty (20 times one’s annual income), made his personal worth about $11,000 million. Just as we are deciding that this is an achievement to wonder at, Buchan adds with some severity that ‘fortunes made in finance ... require little intelligence and ...”

“... ancestors. Visions of future happiness are all very well; but happiness is a feeble, holiday-camp kind of word, resonant of manic grins and multicoloured jackets, not least when compared with the kind of past which, as Marx commented, weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Benjamin was not wholly sceptical of the future, as Fredric Jameson ...”

“... Miltonic; in later years, Robert Morehead transformed Dante into a second Spenser, while Thomas William Parsons made him out to be ‘stately and solemn’ in the manner of ‘Gray and Dryden’. T.S. Eliot’s essay of 1929 argues against such Anglocentric and Italocentric definitions, but only by ascribing even greater consistency and homogenising power ...”

“... who was born in the year of the Bolshevik revolution, remains broadly committed to the Marxist camp – a fact worth mentioning as it would be easy to read this book without realising it. This is because of its judiciousness, not its shiftiness. Its author has lived through so much of the political turbulence he portrays that it is easy to fantasise that ...”

“... and the locomotive is used there to wheel up shot, shell and other implements of war … from the camp in the Crimea, to the War Office in London, the Commander in Chief now reports direct the state of the siege every few minutes … a telegraph submarine cable, 301 miles long, is laid in the bed of the Black Sea, stretching from the monastery of St ...”

“... in England were spent in my grandparents’ little brick bungalow, at the foot of Caesar’s Camp, near Folkestone. (Their house and lane have since disappeared – razed to make way for the stark, moonscaped run-up to the Channel Tunnel.) It was in those lonely, quiet days – the clock ticking on the mantel-piece, the adults discoursing in another room ...”

“... we could go through; we passed by many hundreds of lorries and tents, the white troops in one camp, the black in another. An old woman in the village said that they preferred the black; they were quieter and more polite. Is it not an irony that the English countryman prefers the ‘black trash’ to the ‘lords of creation’? We emerged from the park at ...”

“... first peacetime, non-departmental intelligence organisation’.Fleming delivered the report to William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, a much decorated First World War veteran who had been lobbying Roosevelt to establish an American spy agency separate from the Navy, War and State Departments. A month later Donovan submitted his ‘Memorandum of Establishment of ...”

“... astonishment, never forgave him for showing such ‘weakness’. Neither did his friends. It took William Taubman almost twenty years to complete his wonderful Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. This Gorbachev biography took a mere 11. And yet it is in some ways an even more heavyweight product. The research is vast; the tracking down of published and ...”

“... it up, just go out there and kill Soviets.’ These orders came from a most peculiar American. William Casey, the CIA’s director from January 1981 to January 1987, was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion, called ‘Maryknoll’, on Long Island. He attended mass daily and urged Christianity on ...”

“... Those condemned to this liminal existence looked back on the notoriously harsh Changi prison camp in Singapore, where they had first been incarcerated, as a haven of order and plenty. Lieutenant Watt was believed to have been killed in the defence of Singapore, the War Office informed his mother. Ten months later, a message came via the International Red ...”

“... occasioned by a wet Scottish summer.This is a bit unfair. The recent struggle for the right to camp on Dartmoor is a reminder that Scots should be glad of the 2003 Act, which, among other things, formalised the traditional right to roam and established a community right to buy. But change in the distribution of ownership has been painfully slow. A report ...”

“... We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the Fitzwilliam. I take in a chance selection of pictures, dictated by which happen to be in range of available banquettes, and in particular the Van Dyck portrait of Archbishop Laud. It’s hung beside one ...”

“... than a hundred pages to launch the French ‘philosophy of the concept’, composed in a prison camp in a few months in 1942. And Wittgenstein wrote the 80-page Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, his revolutionary critique of Russell and Frege, from the trenches of the First World War. It does nothing to belittle the achievements of Cavaillès and Wittgenstein ...”

“... treasures of his well-stocked mind, his poetic imagination, his mystical obsessions and his high camp sense of fun with anyone who was worthy, as well as with quite a few ... who were not. It was Jacob more than anyone else who taught Picasso to speak a French which was ‘idiomatic and witty, and on occasion eloquent (despite a heavy Spanish ...”