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“... to mind an image drawn from another sport: Lucy endlessly lining up the football for Charlie Brown to kick, only to pull it away at the last moment and send him flying. Obama did the opposite of that. He went out of his way to ensure the ball was where it needed to be. All she had to do was swing. And she whiffed. The tug-of-war between the two sides of ...”

“... he would ‘like to meet soon. There is much I would like to talk about, with you.’ When Gordon Brown became prime minister in 2007, he invited Thatcher to Downing Street and greeted her warmly at the front door. By this point her health was poor and some criticised Brown’s gesture as exploitative of a sick old ...”

“... of Fair Trading, and a director of Mirror Group Newspapers, whose anti-trade union regime under David Montgomery was ushered in with the blessing of the Mirror’s new accountants, Arthur Andersen. Borrie’s introduction to the Social Justice Commission report was full of praise and gratitude for the free help given by Andersen Consulting. The ...”

“... David Vann’s novel – his debut, after a short story collection, Legend of a Suicide (2008), and a memoir, A Mile Down (2005) – is a book that makes Cormac McCarthy’s The Road read like a walk in the park. Compared to Caribou Island, The Road is grim-lit lite. After 200 pages of unrelenting misery, McCarthy breaks down and accepts the possibility of grace: after a long trudge through a post-apocalyptic landscape, a woman turns up on the last page, out of the blue, and says: ‘The breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time ...”

“... nor connected with lineage: King Louis XI of France was described by a German viewer as ‘brown’. Groebner tells us that ‘the skin colours that European travellers caught sight of in various parts of the New World in the 16th century coincided with those they employed to describe their own skins.’ Only well after the 16th century, Groebner ...”

“... made sport with the superficial similarity. The British Lenin might all too easily have become the David Cameron of his generation, blessed with born-to-the-purple public school assumptions and a casual, unimaginative indifference to the everyday struggles of the masses. Not that there was ever any ‘swank’ about Attlee, but at Oxford between 1901 and 1904 ...”

“... to be taken seriously and relying on a single performance by Jo Grimond, Jeremy Thorpe or David Steel to give them whatever credibility they could earn. It was Labour that faced the real problem. Defeat for the leadership – often following a bitter row – saddled it with policies unacceptable to its own MPs and profoundly unattractive to the ...”

“... preoccupations and tastes. In her straining after the essence of things, she reminds one of David Malouf and of Bruce Chatwin (who married into her clan). I don’t mean that she copies them: she is too committed, too intense for that; an element of what an American reviewer called ‘self-administered therapy’ convinces one that she is too seriously ...”

“... particularly disappointing not to find any mention of Gary Nash’s The Urban Crucible (1979) or David Galenson’s White Servitude in Colonial America (1981). Student readers of Jones and Brogan could be forgiven for thinking that little of relevance has been published in this area of American history since the mid-1970s, while nothing could be further from ...”

“... heard from. And the bonding that went on had no trouble in backgrounding the rancours of Mr Ron Brown, MP for Edinburgh, Leith, for whom Gaddafi was at least not a drunkard and a womaniser, like a number of his colleagues. All the same, Denis Healey’s speech reads like a Parliamentary masterpiece which at no point fell short of its subject. It stressed ...”

“... and friend. There are at least two reasons for this. The story has often been told, notably by David Cannadine, of how the long agricultural depression broke the power of the British aristocracy, but it also drove tenant famers and labourers off the land and into the cities and suburbs; a million or more had emigrated by 1914. As a legacy of this flight ...”

“... outfit as on the Saugus, is stood in his socks, his legs bound, a hood over his head; a man in a brown hat, shaded by one of several umbrellas, is adjusting the noose. Powell’s co-conspirators, George Atzerodt and David Herold, still have their heads free: their expressions – private reckoning, a kind of baffled fear ...”

“... Bernhard (1931-89) is marked by deaths: those of his majoritarian and minoritarian translators David McLintock and Ewald Osers, in 2003 and 2011 respectively; and in 2015 that of Carol Brown Janeway, his publisher at Knopf, his unlikely champion over decades (because, for all his influence and cultishness, Bernhard in ...”

“... put it, ‘a feminine no-shovel potter’. She used an electric kiln, which was anathema to the brown-pot brigade. At first she was disconcerted by the Leach ethos, but after a few experiments in that direction she regained her balance. Later, she won Leach round. Always a man’s woman, she made him into a close friend and an occasional lover. Rie ...”

“... remnants of dozens of gravestones that had long ago been removed for use as building materials. Brown hens pecked at the grass. It was impossible to tell where my ancestors were buried or the location of the mass grave containing five hundred of the town’s Jews, shot in 1942. But few descendants of the Ostjuden who visit Eastern Europe in search of their ...”