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“... not for very much longer). ‘Throughout most of recorded history’, the British epidemiologist Martin McKee and colleagues recently observed, the concept of universal healthcare ‘was essentially meaningless because healthcare had so little to offer’. In much of industrialising Europe, premature mortality began its decline well before the advent of ...”

“... of a cycling club soon to be obliterated in the First War. Poets cycling by default: according to Martin Amis the poet is defined as a person who is incapable of driving a car. Philip Larkin, the great Eeyore of English verse, pushing his bike through a Hull graveyard, white raincoat and clips, misted spectacles, for a John Betjeman documentary. David ...”

“... Jelinek was already 22. This was the high-water mark in Austria’s radical postwar renaissance. Thomas Bernhard was the acknowledged leader of the dissident pack, with Peter Handke and the Forum Stadtpark group from Graz representing the next wave of an obligatory avant-garde. Jelinek was at the young end of this group, but gained instant recognition within ...”

“... be hanged and allowed to die before the rest of the sentence was carried out.In the same programme Thomas Cromwell is pictured as being inexpertly despatched by a novice executioner, Cromwell’s face contorted in agony as the first two blows fall, his head only cut off by the third. This, too, is fanciful. Certainly there must have been many botched ...”

“... and whose influential drummer-boy has been the New York Times columnist and Middle East expert Thomas Friedman. Last October, after seven years of writing columns in praise of the Oslo peace process, Friedman found himself in Ramallah, under siege by the Israeli Army (and under fire). ‘Israeli propaganda that the Palestinians mostly rule themselves in ...”

“... But the three officers connected with these documents – Vernon Attwell, John Donaldson and Thomas Style – had signed witness statements in December 1974 stating that the manuscript notes were contemporaneous, and they had repeated this on oath in the trial in 1975. If the rough typed notes were indeed a draft from which the manuscript notes were ...”

“... emphatically with his fallibilistic science. Roudinesco’s Freud is in this sense a reissue of Thomas Mann’s Freud, who belonged with those 19th-century writers ‘who stand opposed to rationalism’. It is a redemptively anti-heroic project, which allows her to explore without apology the foreign bodies in Freud’s rationality and the errors of his ...”

“... to remember writing some dark allegorical story.Poems?No. I’d written odd poems, very sub-Dylan Thomas. I remember having or buying Thomas’s Collected Poems. I liked the whole idea of him so anything I wrote sort of resembled him, though I pretended it didn’t.Were you working quite hard in the sixth form for your ...”

“... erotic humour … Finally, facetiousness, honest to its own failing.’ She is writing here about Thomas Mann). And she did it when she spoke, shifting pitch and tone and precise degree of suppressed hilarity: ‘You must eat orrrranges,’ when a student went down with a winter sniffle. ‘You must read Marianne Weber, then you will understand the ...”

“... political figures of the age, though someone who barely gets a walk-on part in this volume. Martin Luther King told his supporters, who were fearful of what a Texan like Johnson would do in the White House: ‘LBJ is a man of great ego and great power. He is a pragmatist and a man of pragmatic compassion. It may just be that he’s going to go where ...”

“... an ex-Cluniac monastery that was among the properties (they included Kirkstall Abbey) granted to Thomas Cranmer on the death of Henry VIII. It wasn’t actually included in the royal will but was part of the general share-out that occurred then to fulfil the wishes supposedly expressed by Henry VIII on his deathbed. Not far away is Harewood House (where I do ...”

“... to his body as a walking lab, pills slushing against potions in his insides. Ten years earlier, Martin Amis had reviewed one of the first British documentaries about Aids for the Observer. Aids, he wrote, ‘is a visitation that makes you believe in the Devil’: With Aids … it seems to be promiscuity itself that is the cause. After a few hundred ...”

“... It’s an old tactic and it is still in play around the Grenfell disaster. As soon as Martin Moore-Bick, the chair of the public inquiry, announced that he would be seeking answers rather than taking dictation from those with passionate feelings, he was dismissed as a ‘posh white man’. It was reported that the community felt he had ‘the ...”