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“... I recollect it) trounced his left-leaning discussants pretty decisively. When he arrived, the West Indian waitress looking after us went up to him with a big smile and said, ‘Can I believe my eyes?’ to which the expressionless reply was: ‘Gin and tonic, please.’ The second was when we were fellow guests with him, his wife and Mo Mowlam at dinner ...”

“... call it ‘terrorism’. The messianic zeal with which Israel rushed to conquer and colonise the West Bank soon troubled Jewish liberals like Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Jean Daniel, the editor of the Nouvel Observateur, but Lanzmann’s attachment to Israel only grew fiercer. After the Six-Day War, Lanzmann returned to Israel. He spent time with troops on the ...”

“... it is announced that the president is planning to disband the Corona Task Force, whose doctors Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx have been prominent in daily briefings. According to Vice President Mike Pence, ‘it really is all a reflection of the tremendous progress we’ve made as a country.’ He does not say that it is a reflection of the task force’s ...”

“... in the Welsh hills. When the river makes trouble for Tewkesbury, it begins there, far to the north-west, with downpours that take days to swell the Severn downstream. There’s time to act, and usually there’s no need; the river bloats out into the meadows of the floodplain for a few days, one or other of the usual handful of houses gets flooded, and the ...”

“... the left and the right. It isn’t by accident that Jed Bartlet – the fictional president in The West Wing, the TV fantasy that sustained liberal America during the dark Bush years – was a genial economics professor and Nobel laureate. It was a fantasy. The synthesis of brains, wisdom and power embodied in Bartlet didn’t stand up to 21st-century ...”

“... by journalists heaving with indignation at secret service inefficiency and treachery. Nigel West’s book on MI6 looks by comparison, like an exercise in name-dropping. Not that Mr Andrew does not have his throw-away lines. Sir Claude Dansey, that unattractive deputy head of MI6, was, it appears, seduced at the age of 16 by Robbie Ross. Tom Driberg was ...”

“... misunderstanding – the tragedy of incomprehension which has brought Japan to war against the West. The personal element of the tragedy comes not just from the feeling of his own life being wasted (and anyway, much of the poem seems to have been written after the internment was over) but from regret for the years that were wasted before, when diplomacy ...”

“... volume of new poetry ever again’, and didn’t publish another book of verse for twenty years. Anthony Quinton once gave a sniffy account of Spender’s interesting book about T.S. Eliot, and Spender was mortified, as though caught out doing something he had no right to attempt: Quinton’s piece was ‘of the kind I always bring down on myself and which ...”

“... plague. For months, the Protector’s propaganda sheets pumped out tales of a great triumph in the West Indies. The ship that finally brought news of the grim toll was kept offshore in quarantine, not for fear of disease but rather to stop the news getting out. (This was by no means a unique early example of fake news. Elizabeth I squashed the news of the ...”

“... various ways. For those with the deepest professional investment in the discipline as it existed, Anthony Giddens, for example, the task was to work even harder at establishing sociology as the primary explainer and navigational aid of modern societies. Elsewhere, a kind of postmodern sociology emerged, inspired by French theory, which was suspicious of ...”

“... Fascist grimace beneath the festive veneer’. After the war he became suspect in the USA and in West Germany, because he refused to attack East Germany, and because his old-fashioned democratic principles made him look like a Communist. He finally found the political air of 1950s America unbreathable. ‘I am unspeakably tired of this country,’ he ...”

“... can draw inspiration? François Mitterrand was born in 1916 in Jarnac in the Charente, in south-west France. He was the son of a stationmaster, and the grandson of a vinegar maker in the Cognac region. He was raised in a well-off and well-educated Catholic family; they were staunch traditionalists, but not followers of the extremist, anti-Semitic Action ...”

“... Mills, Pine and Gilmore, Thomas Frank), and even a few socio-economic ones (Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens). The point is, however, not necessarily to endorse these (many are standard culture critiques), but rather to indicate the direction in which literary theory opens onto other disciplines. Class analysis is meanwhile omnipresent, and plagued as ...”

“... about having lied to American officials for two years about Pakistan’s aid to the Taliban, and Anthony Lake, the US national security adviser from 1993 to 1997, who lets it be known that he thought the CIA director James Woolsey was ‘arrogant, tin-eared and brittle’. Woolsey was so disliked by Clinton that when an apparent suicide pilot crashed a ...”

“... familiar environment. It is almost impossible to imagine what it would be like to work in the West Wing these days, given how far removed it currently is from anything that went on there before. Yet anyone who has ever worked with a narcissistic boss drunk on his or her own power will recognise it at once. The pettiness of Trumpworld is like the pettiness ...”