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“... him the opportunity to exercise his unstoppable curiosity. (Trained as a fighter pilot on National Service in the early 1950s, he was told that he was best suited to flying at night: in daylight he was too often distracted by the view.) He lectured across the faculties in Cambridge in the late 1960s and the 1970s, sat on several official commissions, and wrote ...”

“... in letters to an elder brother, my grandfather, Basil Hastings, who was medically unfit for active service: 23 June 1915 Dear Basil, we went in the trenches for 24 hours on Monday. It was extremely interesting and exciting. They shelled us a bit and threw a few hand-grenades and hand-mortars. We had one casualty. I was firing at a sniper with a periscopic ...”

“... officers were warned about German female agents hiding cameras in their blouses. The Security Service (MI5), on the lookout for spooks in Britain, taught its operatives about the use of lemon juice and semen as secret inks, with talcum powder or perfume as fixatives. The Swedish-born Eva de Bournonville was found to have in her possession cakes of soap ...”

“... of pounds it costs the country in terms of road accidents, premature death, burdens on the health service, family breakdown, suicide, homicide, assault, domestic violence, homelessness and police time. Not to mention all the personal misery. Yet faced by so much destruction and epidemic unhappiness, society displays an amazing degree of alcohol ...”

“... of sentiment and inner light. Given the human tendency ‘to conceive of our obligations as a service performed for God’, a community must obey the imperatives of human reason as if these imperatives ‘were the commands of a God who is moral ruler of the world’. Lilla speculates that Kant may not have fully appreciated the opening he created for a ...”

“... were widely shared in the 1970s and early 1980s. In February 1974 the head of the home civil service, Sir William Armstrong, suffered a dramatic nervous breakdown in Downing Street, convinced that democracy itself was at stake in the miners’ confrontation with Ted Heath’s government. When Armstrong’s colleague Sir Douglas Allen, the permanent ...”

“... and more senior general, who had once commanded the garrison in Hong Kong, recommended him for service in the Maritime Customs. Academic grief was actuarial good luck. Gazetted into his future employment just before the outbreak of war, and issued with an ‘outfit allowance’ of £100, he was contractually bound to five years’ ...”

“... Régime. All belonged to a nobility accustomed for centuries to serve the state, and once this service was no longer required, they adopted an ironic and fatalistic attitude to their future. There was no point fighting against History: better to decline with dignity. Don Fabrizio watched ‘the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever ...”

“... precisely from the skill with which he has blocked off implication and afterthought. Long ago, Robert Bridges observed about one of Keats’s lines that ‘it displayed its poetry rather than its meaning.’ That was once a criticism, certainly, but neither the old nor the new Decorated styles are subject to the censure that attends the absence of meaning ...”

“... arising from drug-taking, the latter his attempted dismissal of Percy Loraine from the Foreign Service. His complaint was that Percy had given him irrefutable but unwelcome advice – always an unforgivable offence in Edward’s eyes. When the facts of the Loraine case were first made public, there ensued a chorus of denunciation, not of Edward, but of ...”

“... under which ministers operate, together with the precedents and prejudices of those in the Civil Service who were responsible for advising on policy and for carrying out the wishes of ministers. The years that followed the war were a time of great agricultural expansion: the nation was short of food and short of money to buy it from overseas. There was a ...”

“... what he thinks, and this affords some assurance that he will do what he says. With 35 years of service – first as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, then as a member of Congress re-elected seven times, and finally as a senator – he entered the presidential contest with more first-hand political experience than Obama or Mrs Clinton had in 2008. Besides, the ...”

“... and in the last layers of the cloth that malignant Egyptian had tucked away a communication service of the most awful kind to the address of any man who disturbed him. He should die horribly in the open as a beast dies at the hand of a beast and there should not be enough of him to put into a matchbox, much less a mummy case. Whereat they laughed and of ...”

“... voters thought about the last six years of Labor government on the eve of the election, the civil service seemed to have reached a view.Australia has had far less to worry about than most post-2008 economies, with China hoovering up its minerals and crude oil, and Labor – praised for its efforts by the IMF – bent on generous public spending ...”

“... 30 seconds of gunplay in a flat in the Latin Quarter in 1975 when he shot dead two French security service officers together with a Lebanese accomplice who had reluctantly led them to him. Although members of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, as it was then known, were supposed to carry pistols, all three turned out to have been unarmed. Then on ...”