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“... was among the smoothest in Eastern Europe. Hungary spent the 1990s as a model pupil of the West, finally joining the EU in 2004. Now, almost a decade on, it is led by the charismatic, self-declared ‘right-wing plebeian’ Viktor Orbán, a man whom critics charge with the ‘Putinisation’ of Hungary. Thanks to his government’s undermining of the ...”

“... Andy Warhol produced a silk-screened Nixon with skin as biliously green as the Wicked Witch of the West and, in a riotous series of drawings, Philip Guston transformed the president’s ski nose and heavy jowls into a glumly expressive set of male genitalia. Nixon’s personality was even richer. Gore Vidal parodied him in his 1960 play The Best Man ...”

“... The vision of regaining a pre-Babel state of universal linguistic grace was given a fillip in the West with the ‘discovery’ of Chinese, and the idea not only therefore of a charactery, but of a system of oral signs also, that might be firmly anchored in ‘matter’ (cf. the reference to Bacon above) and hence be universal: a linguistic base for ...”

“... Plastic straps seem unlikely for this period, though this may be a fault of Adrian Nathan West’s translation. He could certainly have done better with the ‘Ministry of Home Safety’. Such an institution would presumably concern itself with such things as electrical insulation and the flammability of soft furnishings, potentially life or death ...”

“... certainly the fixer, of modern camp’, as Brophy wrote in her book about him, Prancing Novelist). Anthony Blunt, a friend of Brophy and Levey’s, inspired the headmistress, because Brophy found his relationship with his besotted vice-director amusing. She changed his gender since ‘it would have been very hard to create a scandal’ with a woman and a ...”

“... expressions of power’ (a view close to that of another Cambridge sociologist, Anthony Giddens, who terms them ‘power-containers’). The limitations of this way of looking at the historical significance of cities needs no labouring. Feudalism as a form of society provides a set of similar paradoxes. Here there is a considerable existing ...”

“... robberies did take place, it is unlikely that, in a community as small and close-knit as that of West Belfast, such events would not have been widely known and discussed. Similarly, neither the police nor the Crown has ever provided details about the other Belfast incidents in which Armstrong is supposed to have been involved: the only evidence that they ...”

“... translating the text by looking up the Greek words he didn’t know, and proffers thanks to M.L. West for unstinting help and advice. As the author of the indispensable if not uncontroverted Making of the ‘Iliad’ as well as the editor of the newest Teubnerian Iliad, and of the new Loeb volumes on the Homeric hymns and the Epic Cycle (a wonderful ...”

“... later, Benn could not even get him onto a postage-stamp, at a time when Rosa Luxemburg adorned West German mail. Such treatment, it might be argued, is not without all justice. For in a comparative perspective, did not the English Civil War – however traumatic at the time – prove in the end to be the least significant of the political upheavals that ...”

“... bars of which bring back memories of what I most disliked about those times. Now it is back in the West End, and its revival coincides with the publication of Sebastian Faulks’s percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most ...”

“... global citizens, even as America’s Polaris missiles arrived at their new home on Scotland’s west coast. But he was also stating a more practical problem facing the globetrotting Scots bourgeoisie. With few lands left to plunder, what did Britain have left to offer its junior partners? Without the surplus wealth and privileges of empire to dole out, how ...”

“... category. Among them are Susan Browne, ‘taken in bed with a Scotsman in a common bawdy house’; Anthony Horne, tailor, ‘locked up in a shed in Chiswell Street with Margery Blague in the night, and apprehended by the constable’; Henry Manne, gentleman, ‘complained to be a very disordered fellow, and keeping company with Alice Sherwood, a common ...”

“... to him? Son. A few years ago, when I asked my father why he wasn’t going to the house in south-west France where he had for several summers spent a few weeks, his answer sounded straightforward. ‘Too far from Figeac,’ he said. Too far from Figeac? I asked. The house was a distance from the town in the Lot with its baker and café, this was true, but in ...”

“... Churchill played host at a country-house weekend. The queen had her to tea at Buckingham Palace. Anthony Eden took her to the movies. Drawbell wasn’t satisfied. In the book he wrote about Thompson’s visit – Dorothy Thompson’s English Journey, now deservingly out of print – he envisioned the ‘scene that would have been played out’ if she had ...”

“... the drug-smuggling President of Panama whose airline tickets on one BCCI-sponsored spree down the West Coast of the United States cost $30,000; and Saddam Hussein, who managed not to pay back a loan of $12m on the grounds that he had a ‘special relationship’ with BCCI, in that it did not require him to make any special repayments. All this generosity to ...”