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“... The intention was to find a practical means of honouring his work. I was taken to a tiny North London council flat, and there sitting in the middle of its cramped living-room, I encountered a very ancient and frail-looking man, striking mainly for the large and antique ear-trumpet which he applied when straining to catch remarks addressed to him. I ...”

“... to give it? We live in a culture where belief in the supernatural is strong and growing. In 1660 Joseph Glanvil (quoted by Taylor) could write: ‘The present-day world treats all such stories with laughter and derision and is firmly convinced that they should be scorned as a waste of time and old wives’ tales ...’ But in 1977 a poll of American ...”

“... President of the United States.’ His popularity in the country, especially among Labour people north of the Trent, held up remarkably throughout much political misfortune and extended into his retirement. This was something which metropolitan comment tended to ignore. Wilson was an incorrigibly provincial man with the common touch, and that, I ...”

“... possession of a rarely seen film by Andrzej Wajda, Smuga cienia, from 1976. It is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s short, openly autobiographical novel The Shadow-Line (1916). Wajda conceived the film as a modest docudrama based on Conrad’s last mission at sea. The British government, in the thick of the First World War, had enlisted the ageing celebrity ...”

“... Miami Beach, the Keys. The constrictor-ridden Everglades, sugar and snakes. Or, indeed, G, way up north and bang inland, roughly equidistant from both coasts and the Georgia Line, unfashionable, ungarish, unfrivolous. No sherbet-coloured Deco or exercise-muscle on display here. Leathery, prairie, echt Florida, at just about the point where the orange groves ...”

“... in September 2003, and another into incidents that occurred in May 2004 at a British army base north of Basra, while a third inquiry has been requested on behalf of 102 other Iraqi citizens. Since Cameron’s announcement WikiLeaks has suggested that there may well be 15,000 hitherto unrecorded Iraqi deaths, leading the Guardian to request, under the ...”

“... or a kinder, gentler James Wood? In ‘Two Paths for the Novel’, she looked at books by Joseph O’Neill and Tom McCarthy. Realism, it seemed, was on the run, and it turned out that novels in English could still be vehicles for avant-garde ideas. Why not try to be James Joyce? A bit wobbly and lopsided by design, NW is a hotchpotch in five ...”

“... group founded by David Rockefeller to bring together policymakers, academics and journalists from North America, Western Europe and Japan – put out a controversial report in 1975 titled The Crisis of Democracy, which argued that an overload of welfare responsibilities was enervating democratic states. In much of Latin America military strongmen – Generals ...”

“... butchery of 1914-18. After directing six hours of intense artillery fire from emplacements just north of Gravelotte, the Prussians swarmed the French positions at Moscow Farm and Point du Jour. According to one account, they found the defendersfearfully torn and mutilated by the German shell; limbs and bodies were blown from thirty to fifty paces apart ...”

“... of nothing but Israel”.’ During that trip to the Middle East in July 1953, he toured North Africa, Egypt and Jordan, speaking, as he put it, ‘to Sheiks, fellahs and bubble pipe salesmen’ along the way. It doesn’t seem, at least from the written record, that he talked to any Israelis. Israel had taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees ...”

“... was an international best-seller. Not that constancy was a conspicuous feature of his career. Joseph Hall, ‘our English Seneca’, remarked that Lipsius was as constant as a chameleon. This mattered, for the true Stoic wishes to be judged by his life as much as by his writing. Stoic philosophy is a guide to conduct, and the philosopher, the man ...”

“... home-grown products that had nothing to do with the white man. The growing presence in Europe and North America of wave after wave of non-white immigrants added considerable animus to the tirades. The events of 11 September tipped the scales definitively. Oddly, from the 1980s, this process coincided with the rise of post-colonial studies in British and ...”

“... course of the Nile in the south from what he takes to be its presumptive mirror image in the north, the Danube. Catherine Darbo-Peschanski attributes this view of physis (nature) to Herodotus’ belief in a general and overarching divine pattern ruled by dikê (justice), covering all aspects of culture from geography to the animal world, including human ...”

“... Children in Bow had to sleep in their classrooms. Thousands of empty cars were left blocking the North Circular. The Duchess of Kent was unable to reach her flight at Stansted; the prime minister failed to get to a dinner at the Savoy. A monkey got lost in Oxford Street, and a Slavonian grebe – trying to migrate without sight of ground or stars – made a ...”

“... to François Truffaut in the summer of 1962, he described a scene he had thought of including in North by Northwest (1959), but didn’t. Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is on his way from New York to Chicago. Why not have him stop off at Detroit, then still in its Motor City heyday? I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the ...”