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“... the oddness of some of the president’s other appointments and his treatment of them. General James Jones, whom Obama had never met, was asked to become national security adviser. Once chosen, he hardly ever saw the president alone. To head the CIA Obama picked Leon Panetta, a former congressman who had served as Bill Clinton’s chief of ...”

“... he means those over forty – ‘make the best subjects,’ which would explain the contents (James Hewitt to Henry Kissinger by way of Geoffrey Boycott, Charlton Heston, Dave Lee Travis and Norman Tebbit), but you have to wonder how much of a coincidence it is that men over forty not only ‘make the best subjects’ but also make the best Telegraph ...”

“... extraction named Melanie Klein. It was largely thanks to the efforts of Alix and her husband James in bringing Klein to the attention of the British Psycho-Analytical Society that she moved to London in 1926 after the death of Abraham. He had been Klein’s mentor and analyst, and without him she had little defence against the hostility that was ...”

“... the Criminal Cases Review Commission, will draft a public statement on the A6 murder, for which James Hanratty was hanged in 1962. The Commission chairman, Sir Frederick Crawford, has hinted to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee that the statement will be sensational. The Hanratty case has intrigued and obsessed me for almost all my adult life. In ...”

“... means-ends rationality. ‘I hope sincerely it will be all the age does not want’ (this is Burne-Jones writing about the glorious Kelmscott Chaucer): ‘I have omitted nothing I could think of to obstruct the onward march of the world … I have done all I can to impede progress … having put my hand to the plough I invariably look back.’ Or: ‘Every ...”

“... they primarily document the project’s disintegration between the 2017 and 2019 elections, Owen Jones describes the emergence of Corbynism from the exhausted managerialism of late New Labour, gives a defence of its politics and examines its weaknesses. Both books will be painful and often infuriating reading for anyone who was at all sympathetic to these ...”

“... eating bananas; nine bananas, in fact, five baked and four raw. He had invited his valet Charlie Jones to join him. The valet, who later confessed that he had Chloroformed his employer, refused: ‘I told him that I was afraid of bananas and wouldn’t try any.’ Dr Curry, who attended the body, found that the 84-year-old man had died of natural ...”

“... of last year in which someone who wasn’t Philip Hensher didn’t get hit by someone who wasn’t James Thackara, after Hensher, reviewing Thackara’s first novel, said he couldn’t ‘write “Bum” on a wall’. At least Norman Mailer did head-butt Gore Vidal. Anyway, two hours with the Yellow Dragons is all it takes, and that’s offered at the ...”

“... both sides know the game. And as the form becomes more self-conscious, the writer – Henry James is the obvious example – indicates both inside and outside his novel how the reader will divide the work with him and share the spoils. In this partnership we become lucid and wise. Even the most unlikely circumstances are arranged for our ...”

“... Neal Bowers has published three collections of poetry and two critical books, one on the works of James Dickey and one on Theodore Roethke. For the past twenty years he has occupied a creative writing post at Iowa State University, and, until 1992, led what he describes as ‘a most uneventful life’ in the small town of Ames, Iowa. The majority of poets, he ...”

“... get to see the two unauthorised pictures of Pynchon. One of them is the handiwork of a hack called James Bone, who tracked the novelist down and took him crassly by surprise; he still seems perplexed that Pynchon wouldn’t shake his hand afterwards. The other is a few seconds of footage taken by CNN. In Thomas Pynchon it is played over and over as one of the ...”

“... Scott, a.k.a. ‘Scotty’, chief engineer aboard the USS Enterprise, addressing Captain James T. Kirk: ‘But I canna change the laws of physics, Captain!’ Other than travelling faster than the speed of light, that is. Iron Press have published a collection called Star Trek: The Poems, edited by Valerie Laws. Many if not most of them don’t ...”

“... mobilisation and localisation of their domain’ is one of his examples. In his introduction to James Cochrane’s Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English (Icon, £6.99), Humphrys says that a young man who used the phrase ‘proactively networking’ when applying for a job at the BBC ought to have been ‘publicly executed’. So what should be ...”

“... so does Billy Connolly, alone among broadcasting talent (unless you count Alistair Cooke and Clive James, who provide epigraphs). This may be because Lawson overlooked Connolly when it came to changing the names, or it may be because he forgot Connolly isn’t a member of the royal family. ‘I think you get into such an alternative Britain, once you start ...”

“... to do with the real-life Peter Morrison MP but was inspired by boyhood memories of the real-life James Prior. The fictional ‘Peter Morrison MP’ reappears in Morning Star, the first volume of Raven’s new novel sequence, but now he seems nothing like James Prior MP. We are more likely to think of ...”