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“... European vacations were ‘a mainstay of her childhood … She was comfortable travelling first class and dressing in a formal gown for dinner aboard an opulent ocean liner.’ Such luxury was not an end in itself: edification was. When as a teenager Rich attended a private school, ‘her favourite feeling was “that of having accomplished ...”

“... But the appearances are deceptive. The problem is not the same. Britain’s diminution since the war has been a long-drawn-out process. But its starting point is clear: the illusions bred by victory in 1945, under a leader of 1914 vintage, followed virtually without intermission by the realities of financial dependency on Washington, austerity at home and ...”

“... and lacquered boxes showing scenes of his (largely mythical) heroism in the Great Patriotic War. There were statue groups showing Leonid Ilyich solving engineering problems for an audience of awed scientists, six-foot Brezhnev pencils from the Karl Liebknecht Pencil Factory, Asian rugs embroidered with words of squirming servility, miniature machine ...”

“... prisoners) has recourse to homosexuality merely because nothing else is on tap. Similarly, working-class boys no longer have an automatic respect for ‘gentlemen’ like Gide nor do they unquestioningly submit to their whims. Certainly Gide would never be considered a great ‘moralist’ today. Yet his reputation lingers on; in France the idée reçue about ...”

“... she acquired a driver’s licence, a fancy car and a number of lovers. In 1939, on the brink of war, she married Robert Antelme. The following year, it became illegal for most married women to work. Duras stayed at home and tried to write, but Gallimard rejected her first novel, which after much rewriting was published by Plon in 1943 as Les ...”

“... of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Against the grim background of protracted civil war in the Netherlands, in France and in Germany, Neostoicism offered a philosophy of fortitude and consolation not merely to intellectuals but to princes and statesmen. It was a philosophy for laymen, who found in pagan literature a restorative retreat from the ...”

“... many tasty ingredients: sex, lies, drugs, espionage, violence, race, hypocrisy and a complicated class element’ which involved ‘the Doctor, the Lord, the Spy’ and Profumo himself. The leader of the opposition, Harold Wilson, dubbed them ‘this dingy quadrilateral’, though, as will soon appear, a much dingier quadrilateral was composed of four very ...”

“... anthologies. My favourite example involves the British anthology The Terrible Rain: The War Poets 1939-45, edited by Brian Gardner and published in 1966; not only did it exclude Gaelic work, but its sole mention of Sorley MacLean (who lived until 1996) occurs when Gardner lists him among poets killed in action during the Second World ...”

“... may be under consideration in the deeper recesses of Washington. At any rate, now that the Cold War has ended the Americans can no longer denounce their critics to the South as the puppets of Moscow. The gadarene rush from the countryside to Caracas in the 1970s, followed by the economic stagnation and unemployment of the 1980s, led to social breakdown in ...”

“... the book is now almost forgotten, but it was one of the greatest cultural sensations of the Cold War era. Before it was printed, it was trailed in magazines, and immediately shot onto the American bestseller lists, where it stayed for months, grabbing the attention and occupying the energies of both enthusiasts and enraged critics. The brouhaha subsided ...”

“... the word ‘honour’ catches the eye. In fact, he had been taken prisoner and for the rest of the war was held in German camps, from which he escaped five times, his awkward height always leading to his recapture. Despite this heroic record, he greeted the armistice in low spirits, writing to his colonel that ‘the great joy I share with you is mixed for ...”

“... summers, but with ‘no permanence . . . no roots’; it might also be described as love in a Cold War climate. The earlier part involved Brittany, a large family house at Saint-Briac, and Berlin, where his father served as US Attorney. Kerry was the cosmopolitan, French-speaking child of high-hoping Americans, and he still gives the impression of being ...”

“... But the vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, John E. Hyten, has described space war as ‘inevitable’.The American strategeion sees itself as waging a constant battle against complacency. To ward this off, the political class periodically conjures up imminent threats to US superiority. In the 1990s the ...”

“... is about aspiration, and about the ways in which Britain has and hasn’t changed. A working-class Catholic born in Liverpool in 1954, who became a driven and brilliant lawyer; a young man with no education, born in Wales in 1938 who went to sea at 17 and rose through the seamen’s union, via Ruskin College, to become an MP; a shammes’s son from a ...”

“... a notion that was greatly disliked by Marx, who saw it as the way a particular political and class order turns its construction of reality into an apparently neutral set of ideas which are then taken as givens of the natural order. Empiricism, because it takes its evidence from the existing order of things, is inherently prone to accepting as realities ...”