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“... Communist ‘front’ organisations; the darkened, lower face involved the use of very different means to achieve the same end without provoking nuclear war. One of these means was the employment of surrogate forces to support movements of so-called ‘national liberation’ without the direct involvement of the Red ...”

“... the snakes all her life. And she knows enough to realise that Manhattan is no escape. For what she means by California is America as a whole, or the westward tendency, the restless, vague assertion that it is all going to turn out for the best. Instead of it being a suitable subject for autopsy. There have been arguments over the years about Didion: has she ...”

“... supporters are the prime minister of Israel and the mayor of Jerusalem – but rather what he means by putting our own interests first. He said America would not seek ‘to impose our way of life on anyone’, which seems a clear warning against nation-building such as Bush and Obama attempted in Afghanistan. Yet the tone of the speech and the tone of the ...”

“... cult of the Bhagwan Rajneesh. Returning to New Jersey in orange garments after a summer in India, David announced that he wanted to change his title in the university catalogue from ‘professor’ to ‘swami’; teach ‘The Wisdom of the East’ instead of ‘Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner’; and replace the furniture in his office with a simple ...”

“... All in all, I get the feeling that TV overrates its audience’s blood-lust, or squirmlust. Take David Dimbleby’s grilling of Tony Blair on Panorama. Most of the interview was spent raking over Blair’s Old Labour past. At first this line seemed fair enough. Blair, after all, had on that very day been assuring his new City chums that almost nothing the ...”

“... Good Book says, come to us all. We all know that each of us will soon disappear from the Earth. David Raup’s book compounds our pessimism by pointing out that – if humans are anything like other animals – the fate awaiting our species as a whole is also an almost certain annihilation. Very few creatures persist for long in evolutionary time. There are ...”

“... and John Balliol, lord of Galloway. Both claims originated in the marriages of the daughters of David, earl of Huntingdon, the youngest grandson of David I of Scotland. Balliol had a claim by primogeniture, as the grandson of Earl David’s eldest daughter, Margaret. The strength of ...”

“... Ican list​ a hundred things David Foster Wallace should have written before he wrote a book about tax accountants. One, and the most obvious, is a novel about Irish dancers on tour with a Michael Flatley figure whose influence grows more sinister over time. Pounds of verbal oil will be poured into his perm; his bulge will almost rupture his trousers ...”

“... Is Said to Have Mulled Russia Channel – Trump Tower Meeting – Aim was a Secret Means for Communications During Transition.’ Those lines say all that the story has to say – the channel was never established. But they strung it out to seven short paragraphs based on a leak from ‘three people with knowledge of the discussion’. Fourteen ...”

“... member, I have now read, in addition to the biography, the full-length critical studies by David Mikics and James Naremore, watched Jan Harlan’s excellent documentary, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, and explored every entry in The Stanley Kubrick Archives edited by Alison Castle: a 13-pound art-historical tome containing solid articles on every ...”

“... In J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, Disgrace, which is set in a violent post-apartheid South Africa, David Lurie, a Cape Town academic, reaches a similar conclusion when his daughter Lucy is gang-raped by three black men at her isolated homestead in the Eastern Cape. ‘But why did they hate me so?’ Lucy asks. ‘I had never set eyes on them.’ ‘It was ...”

“... no talking, coughing, clearing of the throat, or any movement whatsoever of the lips. As David Thomson remarks in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, this was a life ‘so primed for legend, it leaves one feeling that the doleful, suspicious Hughes had some hygienic plan for missing life altogether and going straight into myth’. Hughes was, after ...”

“... which is now universally referred to as rilievo schiacciato (squashed or mangled relief). By this means, aerial perspective was introduced into sculpture for the first time – and almost in advance of its reintroduction into painting. But we also find reliefs in both bronze and marble which are composed of figures crushed into the front plane. These might ...”

“... rendered almost three million of the country’s 14 million Kurds homeless – and they have by no means finished. When I first came to Diyarbakir, I had no inkling of Turkey’s attitude to its Kurdish community. I swallowed the official line that the region had been closed because of the Soviet threat to Nato’s eastern flank. Kurds were merely colourful ...”

“... slabs of plangent sound steadily ringing out. A Pollock affects us through the abundance of its means, a Newman through the sparingness of its means. The slight curve in a band of colour in Adam suffices to evoke a human figure moving. Almost all the surface of Eve is a vermilion rectangle, but this appears to contain so ...”