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“... So a happy life too? He himself, it seems, was not quite so sure. At his memorial service, Mark Bonham Carter revealed that Grimond thought of his career as a failure. True, after he became leader of the Liberal Party in 1956, in the midst of the Suez crisis, with only five followers in the House of Commons, he may have promised it a resurgent role in ...”

“... his pea plants, quietly effecting a scientific revolution in complete isolation, is way off the mark. After a disastrous spell as a parish priest, Mendel became a teacher, initially in Znaim, and subsequently at Brünn’s Technical School. He had found his métier. Every reference to his teaching is laudatory, whether from colleagues or pupils. Hugo ...”

“... abortive rebel siege of an ExxonMobil outpost in Aceh in 2001; the failed coup (funded in part by Mark Thatcher) against the ExxonMobil-backed president of Equatorial Guinea in 2004; and the unsteady rise in 2006 of Nigerian oil pirates, whose ‘picaresque criminality – their head scarves, bandoliers and speedboats; their bank robbery techniques, which ...”

“... was rebellion and it was saved for Metroland and the nation. World War One inevitably left its mark. Our ‘flying men’, it seems, did nothing to enhance property values on the Chiltern slopes. The Rothschild estate of Halton was ‘transformed into a vast camp of hutments, which played sad havoc with the beauty of the hillside towards Tring, and this ...”

“... the subject of the play. Experts have divided neatly: some, interested in stamping their mark, have recognised the expediency of disturbing a dream; others have remembered Elvis with cloying sentiments, reminiscent of the singer himself mourning a dead dog in ‘Old Shep’ – which was, significantly, his favourite song, and the one whose chords he ...”

“... clearly found personal relationships difficult – always had, in fact. (‘Must everyone hate my Winston?’ his mother once exclaimed.) In the later stages of the Second World War he continually crossed the Americans, who were invariably (D’Este claims) proved right in the end. Reading this book – whose military verdicts I’m not qualified to assess ...”

“... committee failed to attract even minor royalty, and disregarding such helpful suggestions as Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw and Charlie Chaplin, was obliged to make do with Earl de la Warr, a mere Lord Privy Seal, as a principal guest). But the wedding is cancelled when the secretary of the Society for Purer Australian history inadvertently ...”

“... he was immensely tough; he was also a good horseman and an excellent linguist. He first made his mark in Egypt by his ability to pass himself off, for intelligence purposes, as an Arab. All this, allied to a messianic power to drive himself and others to the limit to achieve a specified goal, was the secret of his success in the Sudan. He was unquestionably ...”

“... Lord Home of the Hirsel. It was under the courtesy title of Lord Dunglass that he first made his mark in politics, carrying Neville Chamberlain’s bag to Munich in October 1938, but it was as the Earl of Home that he quietly slipped into the Cabinet in 1955. Little wonder that his wife at one point entered the Guinness Book of Records, displacing no less a ...”

“... useful art of skipping’. Skip, then, to the moment when the American publishing house John C. Winston Company, taking Maugham at his word, hired him to demonstrate this art. Under the series title ‘Great Novelists and Their Novels’, the books Maugham had chosen were issued in new editions ‘edited by W. Somerset Maugham’ in 1948. In an essay ...”

“... back the Navy on the eve of the Falklands affair. But the greatest civilian despot of them all was Winston Churchill, who, having observed the disastrous fumblings of the First World War at first hand, imposed his own dominance in the Second, and reported, of his experience with the Chiefs of Staff; ‘you assemble in conclave the most gallant of soldiers, the ...”

“... is an insistent sense that, against one’s hopes, corporate America had killed Lennon long before Mark Chapman got to ...”

“... he explained, ‘that some scratching type of discolouration upon the chest is a very easy mark for a man to produce on his own body.’ There were also the consistent and passionate denials of all six defendants that they had had anything to do with the bombings, or had been members of the IRA. All this was trivial compared to the case against the six ...”

“... to Kew Gardens, Queens. Photographs matter in Shteyngart’s memoir. They begin each chapter, and mark the passage of time from early childhood to more or less present day. The final image breaks protocol: Shteyngart is not in the frame and the photo takes the place of a final word. By now we know that Semyon nicknamed his son ‘Snotty’ for being an ...”

“... for change? Well, possibly. In an Australian Financial Review article, the former Labor leader Mark Latham maintained that the last year has been marked by a crippling ‘convergence’ between the Liberal-National alliance and Labor. Just as Blairism took over so much of Thatcherism, so the new Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, has been striving to ...”