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“... power, the same power that once lit the whole village, and I suppose one day might have to do so again. 8 January. I spend a lot of time these days just tidying up and today I start on my notebooks. Around 1964 I took to carrying a notebook in my pocket in which I used to jot down scraps of overheard conversation, ideas for plays or sketches and (very ...”

“... One​ of the minor disappointments about Obama was that he played golf. It’s true that most modern American presidents have liked to play golf – just about everyone from Taft to Trump can be seen with a club in his hand – but Obama was not most presidents. His immediate predecessor, George W. Bush, loved the game but felt he ought to give it up after 9/11, in case it seemed frivolous to be on the golf course when he was sending soldiers into battle ...”

“... demise. President Bush was in Saudi Arabia rallying the troops when the news broke of Thatcher’s fall. He called her at once to express his deep sympathy and his mild sense of bemusement. ‘It was quite emotional for him,’ his press secretary Marlin Fitzwater recalled. ‘He and she had put this together. And now she was going to be gone.’ Some of ...”

“... We’re confident it’s real’: Arthur Aron is a psychologist who has discovered that blood-flows in the brains of people claiming to be in love after decades of marriage resemble those of new lovers. Romance may authentically survive: ‘That’s what the brain scans are telling us ...”

“... used to be called, wield the most astonishing power in the business world and the economy. Not so many know how much power they wield over the Government. The story of Arthur Andersen, and its burgeoning power, is especially interesting. Arthur Andersen is a proud survivor of the stampede of top accountancy firms to sue each other for alleged negligence in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... woodworker: his friends, among them a city official with a record book and a priest, insisted so strongly that he was someone else that he finally agreed, only for his friends to return him to his previous name. Our identification, Groebner suggests, depends on what others say of us. But he goes on to describe the marks and signs people used to identify ...”

“... to imagine Clement Attlee, the most effective champion of ordinary working people in Labour’s history, thriving in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Not only was he a conventional public school product – enormously proud of his Haileybury connection – and an unquestioning British patriot of military mien and ...”

“... twice on that occasion, first against the denationalisation of road haulage by Mr Churchill’s Cabinet and then in a sharp attack on the hypocrisy of the Bevanites, who had swept to victory in the previous day’s NEC elections. It was a bitter, ugly and exhausting Conference. Herbert Morrison and Hugh Dalton, who had ...”

“... and psycho-philosophical pronouncements floating about in it. Stanford White is the author’s great-grandfather. He was a glamorous turn-of-the-century architect in New York, very sought after in his time and still admired today; though most famous, perhaps, for his death. In 1906 he was shot dead while watching a performance of Mam’zelle Champagne at ...”

“... However, the suggestion, and perhaps even the expectation, on the part of Professor Tindall’s publishers, that students might need help in reading and comprehending his mammoth work gives pause for thought. Thus the publishers in question recommend that students – and one assumes they have American students in mind – acquire Thomas S. Morgan’...”

“... to the American air strike on Tripoli and Ben Ghazi, two days before, and to the Prime Minister’s decision – with the minimum of Cabinet consultation – to play the part of an ally by sanctioning the use for that purpose of bases in Britain. The best of the debate justified Mr Healey’s words of praise, and those of ...”

“... parts of England are becoming almost as lonesome as the African veld.’ This was Rider Haggard’s conclusion after two years’ gruelling travel across the farming counties of England in 1901 and 1902. Only the odd Irish tinker trudged the dusty roads. Thistles and rushes invaded the untilled fields. The impression of desolation prompted Haggard to quote ...”

“... and white?’ was a question I asked my mother once. Until that moment her memories of childhood, so much more engrossing than any bedtime story, had unspooled in my head in perfect greyscale. (They do still, in childish defiance of the facts.) It wasn’t as if I’d seen many photographs of her as a girl – I still haven’t – but simply that the ...”

“... 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 ...”