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“... argued the apologist George Fitzhugh, would be better off if we enslaved them all, for then their masters would have some incentive to clothe them, feed them and see them through hard times. Abraham Lincoln came up with a famous rejoinder when he insisted that working for wages was only a temporary condition. Among us, he said, nobody with talent languishes ...”

“... some of the cultural differences between the two labs. (This story is meticulously told in William Broad’s Teller’s War: The Top-Secret Story Behind the Star Wars Deception, 1992.) When the X-ray laser was ditched, Teller scarcely missed a beat, drumming up enthusiasm for the space-based anti-missile system known as ‘Brilliant Pebbles’ – the ...”

“... where, as Roberta Joan Anderson, she grew up the only child of Myrtle, a former teacher, and William, a military man turned grocery store executive. ‘People that shouldn’t have been married, really,’ Mitchell said, and from whom ‘I never had any support.’ ‘I respect faith, but doubt gets you an education,’ the playwright and conman Wilson ...”

“... The system of ‘apprenticeship’, which bound freed men and women to work for their masters for a further period, was abolished in 1838, when ‘full freedom’ was granted after further campaigns in both metropole and colony. But it wasn’t full freedom at all. In the following decades, the emancipated struggled to enjoy the rights that had ...”

“... at Weir’s, Arthur MacManus of the SLP, the needle-pointer from Singer; at the Albion Works, William Gallacher of the BSP; at Beardmore’s, David Kirkwood, who had recently joined the ILP and was a reluctant supporter of the war (‘I was too proud of the battles of the past to stand aside and see Scotland conquered’); and at Barr and Stroud, John ...”

“... pith.’ Or it might be a locker room, where ‘hair pieces like Skye terriers waited for their masters’; or a courtroom, where a lawyer called Cannibal Pinsker has ‘a large yellow cravat that lay on his shirt like a cheese omelette’; or an old man’s trouser fly, three feet long. As a writer, Bellow sees. He sees the bare toes of Pierre Thaxter ...”

“... of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters – Dickens and Balzac even – were flagrantly guilty.’ Pinfold is by admission a self-portrait, so Waugh must have expected readers to speculate on how this observation applied to his own career, and whether he was a one or a two-book man himself. In ...”

“... and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and ...”

“... form, Lane and Dryfeld are ghostly presences who slip the net of social identity. They are also masters of appearance, always turning up ahead of the horde in the frantic search for finds. Recognising no ‘intrinsic values’ beyond customer demand, the book market is a ‘world metaphor’. A Poundian echo declares Lane symbolic of his ...”

“... degree, of the Ancien Régime, before petering out, in the next two decades, into a set of dancing-masters, hairdressers, mercenaries, literary poseurs and embittered snobbish old roués. The Russian emigration of the 1920s still awaits its historian. The Weimar emigration is a different matter. It hit any country that it affected with the force of a powerful ...”

“... a wealth of unfamiliar lore. We learn of black women slaves who refused to be ‘bred’ by their masters; ‘feeble-minded’ (that is to say, sexually adventurous and poor) girls and young women put into mental hospitals and kept there until they agreed to sterilisation; Indian tribes virtually wiped out thanks to federally funded involuntary sterilisation ...”

“... authors whose names are whispered among the cognoscenti like a confederation of secret masters: Gerald Kersh, James Curtis, Mark Benney, Robert Westerby, Alexander Baron, John Lodwick, Jack Trevor Story. They have been struck from the canon, these technicians, these life-enhanced witnesses. They are noticed only by slumming journalists (who have ...”

“... make-over quangos. Welcome to the nouveaux aristos: Lord Rogers, Sir Cameron Mackintosh. Welcome, masters of spectacle: the designer Stephen Bayley and Ken Robinson (who Bayley glosses as ‘in charge of lavatories, parking, visitor flow’). Jobs for those who missed out on Channel 4, Arts Council panjandrums, reality benders. A seat on the board for Bob ...”

“... Jacobean tragedy, but there were enough of them and of attempted assassinations – the murders of William the Silent and Henri III and Henri IV of France; the attempt to poison Queen Elizabeth; the numerous plots, in both his kingdoms, on the life of James VI and I – for threats and rumours of regicide to place nations on recurrent high alert. In life and ...”

“... jet airliners, worried about what the Russians were up to, and comforted by the Giles cartoon, the William Hickey column and The Adventures of Rupert Bear. As with most newspapers, the torrent these days has become a trickle – a trickle supervised in the Express’s case by an owner, Richard Desmond, who made a lot of his money from masturbatory aids such as ...”