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“... things like anti-semitism or fear of Freemasons, which belong more properly to the world of post-Salem paranoia and have been ably dealt with by Professor Richard Hofstadter in his study The Paranoid Style in American Politics, then modern American conspiracy theory begins with the Warren Commission. There had been toxic political speculation at high ...”

“... began​ with a walk-in. In August 2010 a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer approached Jonathan Bank, then the CIA’s station chief at the US embassy in Islamabad. He offered to tell the CIA where to find bin Laden in return for the reward that Washington had offered in 2001. Walk-ins are assumed by the CIA to be unreliable, and the response from ...”

“... Brick, has vanished into the vault, as have Noah Baumbach’s unfinished pilot for a TV version of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, starring Ewan McGregor, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Greta Gerwig, a Ridley Scott-directed pilot for a rejected show called The Vatican, and many others.After Chase shot the pilot for The Sopranos, ten months went by before HBO got ...”

“... its medical industries. The US has provided some of the WHO’s most dynamic figures, notably Jonathan Mann, who led the organisation’s response to the spread of Aids in the 1980s. In narrative fiction and non-fiction, a stock figure has emerged: the brave, principled, maverick American researcher who leaves the safety of the homeland to plunge into the ...”

“... the most touching and tender moments in these works, something it is awkward to point out in our post-Freudian age. The aristocratic Almanach-de-Gotha family lines form a web that transects the whole of the Wehrmacht; their mirror-image is the party network that resists, subtends and extends far beyond them.Bora’s psychology is, however, another matter, as ...”

“... Whisper’) and shopped it around to record labels, but ‘Wham Rap!’s message clashed with the post-Falklands mood of triumphant Thatcherite aspiration.Only Innervision, a start-up label backed by CBS Records, would take a chance on Wham! (the name of the label evokes Stevie Wonder’s 1973 album). It was good timing: Michael’s father – never an ...”

“... from Guatemala to Hungary, Serbia to Switzerland. One act has branched out into its own ‘post-break up’ solo Beatle tribute acts; another, from Brazil, is set to open its own Cavern Club in São Paolo. Beatles tourism belongs to the post-1990s world of arts-led ‘regeneration’ and site-specific ...”

“... for out-of-body bliss. Can I carry off the decadence of it? With all those memories of rusty post-industrial rivulets, municipal chlorine tanks, filled-in lidos of a lifetime stretching back through the polio-defying 1950s to coal-dusted Bristol Channel beaches still being cleared of barbed wire and mines. There is no resistance in the Shangri-La ...”

“... to do with actual genealogical practice. Norman Rockwell’s 1959 cover for the Saturday Evening Post, Family Tree, has at the top of the tree an impeccably white baby – not surprising – one far whiter than might be expected from the swarthy and often disreputable ancestry sprouting up from the roots: at the bottom, a pirate is matched with a Spanish ...”

“... In some places, especially cities, this is the case even now, to the extent that the phrase ‘post-gay’ is slowly becoming current. Therefore, how we read the past, and read into the past, and judge the past are likely to become matters of more open debate. The temptation to make anachronistic judgments and ask anachronistic questions is hard to ...”

“... of something more basic: the article’s price. For all the talk lately about the emergence of a post-industrial economy – in which ‘information’ or ‘services’ are displacing the authority of any single material resource – the last few years have been an object lesson in just how vital to capitalist dreams of the future the control of a few ...”

“... to share generic features with its more popular cousins, but it doesn’t; Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Lethem are not of the same genre as Philip K. Dick, however long Margaret Atwood managed to ‘pass’. Indeed, the solution may actually be a rather simple one, namely that modernism is not a genre, while SF emphatically is – and this opens up ...”

“... every week. Religious revivals prove temporary. The people of Florence soon wearied of Savonarola. Jonathan Edwards, preaching God’s wrath in the 1730s in my home town of Northampton, Massachusetts, brought his congregation to paroxysms of weeping, despair and repentance, but after the ‘great awakening’ had spread through the region and made him ...”

“... at the enemies of the Party on the telescreen. Would Orwell have secretly been delighted by the post-Orwellian sadism of Big Brother the TV series? He certainly understood how groupthink could fuse with sadistic appetites to generate entertainment. But although the Two Minutes Hate in the bath is the kind of thing most people do (or so I want to ...”

“... German strategy, was Harry Hinsley. After the war, Hinsley returned to Cambridge as a don. Post-war Cambridge was dominated in the humanities, not so much by Leavis, as by Butterfield and Oakeshott, who had founded the Cambridge Journal. Through his famous criticism of rationalism in politics, Oakeshott there questioned the assumptions, motives and ...”