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“... evidence, he argues that Cosa Nostra, having regained its strength after the Second World War, laundered drug money from the mid-1970s through a small bank in Milan, Banca Rasini, where Berlusconi’s father had worked all his life and which lent substantial sums to Silvio’s real estate business. Despite the best efforts of prosecutors, it has ...”

“... in fact, died ‘for King and Country’ and many thoughtful people in the decade after the Great War believed that their sacrifice brought patriotism into disrepute. Carter’s book makes an imaginative effort to reconstruct what Blunt would have felt in the 1930s. No doubt he was moved by the hunger marches, certainly he was stirred by the death of John ...”

“... taunt the oddballs in their midst; other targets were orphans (Ya ya ya, your father died in the war!) and Jews. My father was not in fact a Communist, he was an independent, a maverick who ran the Australian Council for Civil Liberties as a front organisation for himself, I thought, though others said for the Communists. It might have been easier for us if ...”

“... who left school at 13. His brief apprenticeship as a carpenter was cut short by the outbreak of war. He tried his hand at most jobs in the building trade, and at worst had to dig roads: ‘a jack of all trades’, he always says, ‘master of none’. Now 81, he has spent the last two years in and out of hospital with multiple myeloma, a cancer which ...”

“... And the young Auden did seem to fancy himself as qualified to lay down the law to an awed class. When compelled into it he disliked the life of the schoolmaster, but it took him some time to rid himself of such fancies, and the stern expository manner that went with them. The seriousness of whatever law he was laying down would sometimes call for ...”

“... veil has come to signify the unbreachable difference between the West and Islam. In the post-Cold War imagination it stands for so many things in so many different cultural contexts – Muslims, women’s rights, women’s oppression, tradition, beauty – that talk about the veil cannot be contained, because each domain of life and action seemingly ...”

“... father’s reign, and he had to be prudent if he wanted to raise the amount he needed to fight the war that he (and others) believed he was required to fight. He took a more prominent role in the leadership of the church, both locally and internationally, than was typical, but in an age of schisms and councils that was unavoidable; no other king did precisely ...”

“... the first public self-immolations, such as that of the Buddhist monk Quang Duc during the Vietnam War or the Czech student Jan Palach after the 1968 invasion; the practice was weaponised to devastating effect by Hizbullah when it launched the first suicide missions against American and French soldiers in Lebanon. This form of ‘suicide-as-a-weapon’, as ...”

“... hope in one’s churlish, outmoded way that the species will remain unfamiliar with global nuclear war, while recalling that the familiar for some people involves teaching disabled children and organising the low-paid. As Felski is aware, no word in the postmodern lexicon is placed in scare quotes more compulsively than ‘natural’. A suspicion of the ...”

“... to talk to me during my visit. As I wandered past the window boxes of geraniums, the sober war memorial, the parish steeples, a fire engine roared down Hochstrasse in celebration, and I glimpsed a tidy group of people disappearing into a brick Fachwerk inn. The only other signs of life were two old women on their knees scraping weeds from the grout ...”

“... Quite when that happened is disputed, but it was probably by the beginning of the first war with Carthage (264 BCE). The people of Segesta in north-western Sicily sent an embassy to Rome to appeal for an alliance on the basis of their shared Trojan ancestry: the entreaty must have made some kind of sense to the assembled senators. For a long ...”

“... word ‘autobiography’, it turns out, hasn’t been around for very long. In 1786, the labouring-class poet Ann Yearsley (‘Lactilla’, from her day job selling milk) published a memoir in which she berated her patron, the evangelical abolitionist Hannah More, for embezzling the proceeds of Yearsley’s own Poems on Several Occasions. Scholars have been ...”

“... and debated with Malcolm X: Condé argued that the struggle of Indian immigrants in Africa was a class issue, rather than a race issue. He was on the streets of Paris during May 1968, where he was singled out by the police and beaten, escaping with a broken nose.He returned to Guinea frequently, however, to visit Sékou Touré, leader of the Parti ...”

“... world it shines a frail light on our unsavoury situation. No doubt it’s tough to be a middle-class liberal in today’s United States, but feeling forlorn should be understood in historical terms, not passed off as a universal plight. It doesn’t seem quite the right way to describe Iranian women protesters or striking railway workers. The book speaks ...”

“... lie in the 1958 constitution, designed by Charles de Gaulle in the midst of the Algerian war of independence. After liberation, with the military but also constitutional debacle of 1940 in mind, de Gaulle had argued for the creation of a powerful presidency: the head of state should be ‘an arbitrator above political contingencies’, able to call ...”