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“... or even, substantially, a set of characters. It’s peopled by loosely acquainted present-day South Londoners, anxious, precariously employed, bright and lonely. Diverse by age, ethnicity and sexuality, they’re narrower by class: nobody well off enough to own a whole house, and nobody in real, urgent trouble. Although the same people flit in and out ...”

“... Bin Laden, ‘SH’ was Saddam Hussein. Although several passages in Rumsfeld’s account of that day are sourced to Cambone’s handwritten notes, this conversation goes unmentioned. Instead, we have the bland assertion that ‘early on, I had no idea if Iraq was or was not involved, but it would have been irresponsible for any administration not to have ...”

“... But even this timorous agenda was too much for the Beaverbrooks, Rothermeres and Camroses of the day. Nothing was done for four years, and when the General Council of the Press was finally set up in 1953 it had no lay members, its chairman was the proprietor of the Times and its remit was simply to protect and promote the freedom of the press. It had no ...”

“... One day in 1993, I found myself on a bus in Oxford with Michael Foot. He looked shambolic even by my standards – donkey jacket, stick, long hair all over the place. But nobody minded. You don’t often see leading politicians on a bus and passenger after passenger came up to say hello. He smiled and was the soul of friendliness ...”

“... they might have come about as the result of natural evolutionary processes. Indeed, we might one day be able to build some from scratch. There are molecular biologists, among whom Sydney Brenner is probably the most vociferous, who espouse such a ‘constructional’ approach to biology. To build a mermaid from first principles one might begin by comparing ...”

“... Were​ they art, or publicity? Can we settle on ‘magic’? Humphrey Bogart was born on Christmas Day, 1899. Lauren Bacall died on 12 August 2014. So the span of William Mann’s well-researched dual biography is some 115 years. But a case can be made that the ‘greatest love affair’ promised by Mann amounted to no more than 216 minutes in the busy years of the mid-1940s ...”

“... go through it. In the Seventies, when my five-year-old daughter arrived from France for her first day in an English school, a boy in the play ground asked: ‘ ’Oo yer for?’ She didn’t know. He asked again, and added: ‘Tottenham or Chelsea?’ She still didn’t know, but she tried Chelsea, and was roundly punched for it. Since the hitherto dormant ...”

“... Fielding, no softie on crime, was surprised that there were not far more criminals. The other day, in a reference to the recent riots in Newcastle, the Archbishop of Canterbury, after mentioning that in the late 18th century some children were employed in mines or mills for six days a week, quoted the Bishop of Chester as saying in 1785 that on Sundays ...”

“... Partly because, over the weekend between the two ballots, Major performed far better on TV than Douglas Hurd and the constituency officers rang their MPs to tell them to go for him. But it’s not a coincidence that Major had spent years being nice to every Tory MP he met, offering himself as a walking tabula rasa on which they could write their own ...”

“... During the phoney war he belonged to the up-and-coming circle of young appeasers, including Alec Douglas-Home and R.A. Butler, who flourished under the patronage of Neville Chamberlain. There was much talk of the prospects for a compromise peace with Germany, and of the menace of Soviet Communism. Churchill was regarded as a dangerous adventurer, liable to ...”

“... we would use for classical narrative: ‘The narrative affirms literally “this happened every day”, to be understood figuratively as “every day something of this kind happened, of which this is one realisation among others” ’ Instead, we must make a clear choice between convicting Proust of imperfect ...”

“... memory, like that of most dysphasics, is unimpaired. He can play chess, hum a tune, plan a day or a journey, read or draw a map, find his way around a strange city. He can add and subtract but not multiply – because multiplication tables are learned verbally. He can write (in numbers not words) any historical date he ever knew or the price he thinks ...”

“... shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change.’ On the following day, the Foreign Office in London replied: ‘The crucial question still remains whether the generals will pluck up enough courage to take decisive action against the PKI.’ Gilchrist shared his superiors’ worry that the generals might be pussy ...”

“... where I live, the air was thick with smoke from fires 300 km away. The stench frightened us all day. In the mountains to the north and on the high plains to the north-east, there were fires along a 350 km front. The temperature was 44 °C; the winds were blowing at up to 100 km an hour. The land, with its extremes of fire, drought and flood – and its ...”

“... For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world ...”