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“... history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.’ What is specific to our age, as Tony Judt once observed, is that we have become extremely skilful at teaching the lessons of history, but quite bad at teaching actual history. The truth is that today’s threats to democracy don’t parallel 20th-century experiences. Fascism – as distinct ...”

“... a brick-lined oven ‘as ravaged as the surface of the moon’ to be blasted into charcoal, while Tony and Dave, nose-blind to the odour of steamed clams, sit around with tea and muffins waiting for the next delivery in the hydraulic lift. Tumours are apparently hardest to burn and glow like gold in the inferno. Outside, as mourners file from the chapel, the ...”

“... into my mind at lunchtime every day for the World at One. Reagan was long gone and Bush was in the White House. He didn’t send me any messages but he had the same initials as the General Belgrano. ‘GB’ was quite common on cars. The drivers would convey me to the president even though he was in Washington and I didn’t have a passport. I knew my ...”

“... The name for them in Kenya, Wrong tells us, is ‘coconuts’: brown on the outside, but white inside. ‘The people John really wanted to impress were not the House of Mumbi, but the House of Windsor,’ a Kenyan journalist said to her. ‘His loyalty to Western values – things like a belief in the importance of rules, transparency, honesty and ...”

“... vans. At that time, remembering pictures of jolly Wehrmacht soldiers wrenching down the red and white Polish border gates, I felt quite protective about frontiers. But then I read a Polish novel. An allegory contrived to lull the censor, it described a tiny sliver of land between Belgium and Germany which had been overlooked by the surveyors as they drew ...”

“... the dread of being abandoned and left alone ...    I dont envy the woman who has married Tony, if she has; she’ll have to keep the handle of a Hoover in the house. Nicholas Jenkins’s note tells us that ‘ “Tony” has not been identified,’ which is probably just as well. Another letter from three months ...”

“... Schadenfreude that led gay activists to say ‘You’re next’ is now greeted by – straight, white – cries of ‘Oh no we’re not.’ Oddly, the critics do not consider the possibility that the campaign itself may have contributed, in the old industrialised countries, to the slowness of the spread of Aids; or that its acceleration in the rest of the ...”

“... anorexia – which is neither here nor there but I may as well admit that too. And then I read The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas, an anti-Freudian Holocaust novel. My parents had it. I remember the passage on the letter scene in Eugene Onegin. (The heroine performs Tatiana.) I also remember the horrifying passage on Babi Yar, where the heroine dies, and where in ...”

“... this can be seen in D.A. Pennebaker’s film Dont Look Back, which records in unblinking black and white a two-week slice of Dylan’s British tour in the summer of 1965. Pennebaker was also present with his camera on the even crazier world tour of 1966, but his footage was hijacked by Dylan, who worked with another director, Howard Alk, to produce a seldom ...”

“... dictator, and blame him for Zimbabwe’s descent into hyperinflation and poverty. The seizure of white-owned farms by his black supporters has been depicted as a form of thuggery, and as a cause of the country’s declining production, as if these lands were doomed by black ownership. Sanctions have been imposed, and opposition groups funded with the ...”

“... ranges of survey data seeking the precise source of his magnetic attraction for the aggrieved white lower-middle and working classes. It will outlast the pundits holding forth on TV, collecting lecture fees and cranking out bestsellers that retail inside dope gleaned, single-sourced and second-hand, from somewhere near the elevators of Trump Tower. It ...”

“... It turns out that the dock leaves of Mantel and Mills were growing near the nettles of not-quite-Tony Parsons all along. The list of recommended authors itself resembles a scrupulously balanced prize shortlist – three men, three women – with a corrective anti-metropolitan bias, the named writers having birthplaces in ...”

“... Grievance and 2ND Poems, seemed to mark him out as an oddity who could easily be ignored. The White Threshold in 1949 and The Nightfishing in 1955 made a conscious break with his earliest work, but just at the point at which he began to win recognition, he appeared to give up writing. Though he continued to publish in little magazines throughout the ...”

“... as much as his bellicose rival Theodore Roosevelt in America’s responsibility to shoulder the white man’s burden. In January 1917 Wilson argued that America should stay out of the war in order, as he said in a cabinet meeting, to ‘keep the white race strong against the yellow – Japan for instance’. He ...”

“... the hydrofoil to Macao in order to see the temples and the villas and the colonial cafés which Tony Watson-Gandy must have seen when he lived there, just after the war, with a Chinese boyfriend and pipes of opium, studying Mandarin. A sudden rush of identification led me, for the length of an afternoon and for the only time in my life, to think boys as ...”